Derivatives and a simple example

This article on NPR.org provides a helpful explanation of what derivatives are, all in the context of chicken farmers. I'm never sure whether near-metaphors like that are helpful or only more confusing, but I can't resist them!

Brooks and Collins on education

What don't they discuss in this week's Conversation, which is about education?  A wide-ranging and fascinating back-and-forth ensues.  I particularly liked the discussion about costs and the growth in managers at UC ("Soon every faculty member will have a personal senior manager") and the trajectories over 4 years of college in various metrics of students' well-being and progress from the Wabash National Study.  Motivation?  Fuhgeddaboudit!

Conard's full monty in the NYT-M

Edward Conard, a retired Bain executive, is interviewed in the NYT Magazine about his forthcoming book on inequality, Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong.  I admit I skimmed the article, but I couldn't find the promised argument about why more inequality was better than less.  Conard is big on saving and investment, which most would agree is important. Perhaps he just doesn't view inequality as good or bad, or maybe it's one of those perspectives that ex post inequality could be evidence of ex ante opportunity.

But the best passage by far was at the bottom of the fourth page:

There’s also the fact that Conard applies a relentless, mathematical logic to nearly everything, even finding a good spouse. He advocates, in utter seriousness, using demographic data to calculate the number of potential mates in your geographic area. Then, he says, you should set aside a bit of time for “calibration” — dating as many people as you can so that you have a sense of what the marriage marketplace is like. Then you enter the selection phase, this time with the goal of picking a permanent mate. The first woman you date who is a better match than the best woman you met during the calibration phase is, therefore, the person you should marry. By statistical probability, she is as good a match as you’re going to get. (Conard used this system himself.)


Look out, eHarmony!!

The UK's double dip?

Much ado was made last week about a second straight quarter of contracting GDP in the United Kingdom, and Paul Krugman's blog pointed in the direction of a helpful writeup by the UK statistical office. Krugman reprints their shocking graphic showing the rebound is more sluggish than was the UK's emergence from the Great Depression. Frightening stuff, but the UK was also relatively less battered by the Depression than the U.S.

Coin shortage in Zimbabwe

A few days ago, the Times updated us on the monetary situation in Zimbabwe, where coins are in short supply in that dollarized economy.

Krugman berates Bernanke

This weekend's upcoming Times Magazine includes an excerpt of Paul Krugman's forthcoming book, End This Depression Now, in which he criticizes the Fed's recent monetary policy as too timid, and in particular too timid relative to the implications of Ben Bernanke's research prior to joining the Fed.

This week I showed the Q&A's from Bernanke's March 2012 lectures at GWU in my intermediate macro class at Queens College.  What stands out now that Krugman's raised this point, that Bernanke appears to have significantly moderated his views on Fed activism, is a mildly reverential invocation of Paul Volcker's and Alan Greenspan's commitments to price stability in the 1980s and 1990s, which appears toward the end of lecture 2. It reminds me of Paul Volcker's hawkish op-ed last fall, which I mentioned here.

VA is asked by vets to look ahead

Here's an NPR article about bottlenecks in mental health service provision for veterans. It quotes Patrick Bellon, an activist with Veterans for Common Sense: "You don't see the real cost in human terms until 20 to 30 years after the conflict has ended," Bellon says. "Only recently have we seen an attempt to increase resources to deal with that cost."

It's nice to see this sound bite fact referenced again, mirroring VA Secretary Shinseki's similar statement a few weeks back. We put it in our Institute of Medicine report in 2010.