The Political Economist

A bit of bureaucratic wisdom by Sir Humphrey Appleby (Yes Minister TV series). If the video doesn't work, see it on this link .

From the EJMR :  "I have a new paper that I consider my best work. For a variety of reasons, the marginal return professionally for this paper is very small for me. But I think it has an excellent shot a top journal, I would estimate 1/3 at the AER (I have published there before). So I am offering it for sale. Here are the details:  1. This paper is not yet posted on my website. It has not been circulated and I have not yet presented it.  2. The paper is applied micro although I will sell it to anyone.  3. Email bids to econpubforsale@hotmail.com . Use a fake account and make sure to send no revealing information.  4. Your bid is for an AER or QJE. If it ends in Restud, you pay 65%. If it ends in the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, or EJ, you pay 35%. Other journals are negotiable. You can choose the submission path as long as it starts with one of the top journals.  5. I will contact the winning bid (or highest real ...

A bit of fun "facts" on tumblr  regarding today's top economist,  Daron Acemoglu : Who is to say that any of these statements aren't true?

...or technological breakthrough. I don't see any other conclusion coming from this picture. Do you? Now the only question is, does this make their recent war threats credible enough? ( yes, I am being sarcastic )

A bit of humor today in the graph of the week section. A friend of mine living in Canada has sent me this short "paper" entitled: "Japan's Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan", by Gregor Smith from Queen's Economic Department. It turns out that it really does look like Japan: How funny is that? To be fair he had to reverse the unemployment rate to get the mirror image of the initial result (which was a standard downward sloping Phillips curve - in the shape of Japan of course). Here's a map of Japan (included in the paper) to verify the comparison:

There was an article in the Guardian over the weekend endorsing Paul Krugman to become the next US Treasury Secretary. Apparently the initiative came from actor Danny Glover who started a petition online.  Here are a few central points in favour of prof. Krugman's candidacy:  "Krugman would be tough to oppose on any substantive grounds. He has a Nobel Prize in economics (also the John Bates Clark award for best economist under 40). The New York Times columnist is probably the best-known living economist in the United States, and perhaps the world." What credentials! If only the author has explained which are these substantive grounds? Liquidity-trap economics I presume?  He continues: "Krugman has been right about the major problems facing our economy, where many other economists and much of the business press have been wrong. A few examples: he wrote about the housing bubble before it collapsed and caused the Great Recession..." (continued...

Note: This post was also published on the Adam Smith Institute blog , on Wednesday, 16th May 2012.  Last year in the UK there was a lot of fuss about the Royal Wedding in economic and political circles. It was led to believe that because of an extra bank holiday for the Royal Wedding last year, and for the Diamond Jubilee this year, the economy slipped back into a recession. An extra bank holiday was apparently the reason why the second quarter of 2011 had negative growth (-0.1%, see graph below). And it will probably be why the UK will have a negative growth in Q2 2012 too, making it three consecutive negative quarters. Things were just starting to look better, didn’t they? The impressive  growth of 0.2% in Q1 2011 was totally offset by the Royal Wedding.  Btw, the UK didn’t slip back into a recession – it never actually got  out of one.  Source: Trading economics If only the British were working on those days, everything would h...

Here’s an interesting anecdote I would like to share with you. It’s on the efficiency of UK public servants, namely the staff working at the local council, administrating the council tax. For those who don’t know, the UK has a system of a local property tax called council tax that is levied on each person occupying a property, and it’s supposed to be used to finance local government services. It’s a lump sum paid by the occupier(s) disregarding one’s income or current work situation (e.g. retirement), although exemptions always exist.  I’m not to rant about its efficiency in the fact that it raises less than a quarter of the funds for the local council, or its unfairness on making it a lump-sum payment regardless of income, or how it’s sometimes used to fund lustrous projects (such as the one on the picture – courtesy of Dan Mitchell ), or anything like that. No, I am more concerned on the issue of simple logic in the daily operations of public service.  In order to s...