by Richard Gowan | Feb 24, 2010 | Africa, Influence and networks
The New Yorker has a long profile of Paul Krugman that’s worth a look. The passage that has stuck with me is not really about Krugman but one of his friends…
Krugman began to realize that in the previous few decades economic knowledge that had not been translated into models had been effectively lost, because economists didn’t know what to do with it. His friend Craig Murphy, a political scientist at Wellesley, had a collection of antique maps of Africa, and he told Krugman that a similar thing had happened in cartography. Sixteenth-century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior—the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become much more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards—secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants—was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off—by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again—but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain.
This could act as a metaphor for all sorts of current debates, and academia’s contribution to them, but I leave you to fill in the blanks…
by David Steven | Feb 24, 2010 | Economics and development, UK
On Tuesday (March 2nd), I am speaking at a seminar on resilience in the UK housing market.
The seminar picks up on my recent paper for the Long Finance Foundation (download it here). The argument in a nutshell:
(1) Housing is probably the biggest economic risk facing the UK – more important even than the deficit; (2) Houses are overpriced – and the fiscal stimulus appears to have reinflated the housing bubble; (3) Mortgages are sold in such a way as to play on borrowers’ cognitive biases – this is bad for many individuals, and systemically disastrous; (4) The FSA’s proposals for reform are half hearted – we’re missing a huge opportunity to rethink how people make long-term financial decisions.
On the panel to discuss the paper, Long Finance’s Michael Mainelli, BrightonRock’s Con Keating, and Channel 4’s Faisal Islam.
It’s at Gresham College at 2.30 – please come along if you can.
by David Steven | Feb 23, 2010 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnoD3NUux3M&feature=PlayList&p=kLi6BpF1IZ4[/youtube]
by David Steven | Feb 23, 2010 | Off topic
Yesterday, a British police dog handler was found guilty of animal cruelty after leaving his two Alsatians in the back of a boiling car. His defence? He forgot they were there.
British tabloid, the Sun is up in arms. Its headline: “Let off…Cop who left dogs to bake.” For some bizarre reason, its website has pictures from the RSPCA of each of the dead dogs.
How can someone leave two large dogs in a car by mistake? Quite easily. Because parents – doting and otherwise competent parents – do the same thing with their children more often than you’d like to think. And if the weather is hot (or cold) enough, the children die:
An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just… forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall. The season is almost upon us.
Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?
The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.
Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating.
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