Would you accept $100,000 to sign a contract stating you will nuke Sep7agon, and never make another forum ever again?

simple economics

increase the supply of pussy

value of pussy goes down

easier to get pussy

what a glorious result. gotta get dat PUSSEH

Mark Sadowski has done a lot of empirical work on the impacts of fiscal austerity in the past couple of years. Most of you will probably know I tend to be pro-austerity (although David Romer makes an interesting case for the use of fiscal tools, and I'm open to things like counter-cyclical social security taxe rates, as was proposed by the NZ Labor Party). Of course, there is a debate to be had on whether or not monetary policy becomes ineffectual at the zero-lower bound.

Personally, I don't think so. I think the Wicksellian view of monetary policy is a flawed one. However, I want to look at some data today. The two competing ideas I want to look at today are the Keynesian idea (fiscal austerity is contractionary at the lower bound) and the Monetarist idea (fiscal policy can be offset by monetary policy, even at the lower bound). Sadowski has done some nGDP regressions on the correlation between fiscal austerity and growth, which seem to support Keynesian expectations at prima facie as there is a clear negative correlation:


Then Sadowski isolates the Eurozone countries, which lack an independent central bank and the regression is consistent with both ideas.


Finally, Sadowski does a regression for countries with independent central banks and we have a regression which supports the Monetarist line of thinking:



And Sadowski's findings are, of course, in line with certain case studies such as the Sequester in the US in 2013 wherein growth outpaced predictions assuming no austerity thanks to Fed easing. And I have a couple of graphs here drawn from IMF data which supports Sadowski's findings above:


Takeaway: Euro: less government spending correlated with less growth
Non-Euro: Fiscal multiplier is an observed zero.

Euro p = 0.04 y=0.8315 - 1.3306*x
Non-euro p = 0.8 y= 2.3166 + 0.1914 *x

Disclaimers:

(I) Average Real GDP per Capita is the y-axis. Average changes in Structural budget is the x-axis. What is a structural budget? It's the percent of potential GDP a country is deficit spending (or building up a surplus). I took the average of changes to account for austerity measures [otherwise many countries would seem to be deficit spending, like Greece, when they made large reductions in their budget] Positive changes mean austerity; negative changes mean more deficit spending

(II) Data excludes Estonia, Cyprus, and Sao Paulo as either one or the other lacked data for Real GDP per capita growth or balanced budget spending.

(III) AFAIK all the other countries have indep. Central Banks. However, Hong Kong and Switzerland at that time had pegs; there's a regression later on down that moves them to the other side to see the affect.

(IV) Why 2007-2013? I would like to include as much as the business cycle as feasible, 2007 touches on periods when the boom is ending, and 2013 takes us up to theoretical areas for recovery (regression for 2010-2013 later on down)

(V) This is a reg x y, and not a replacement for any serious studies on fiscal multipliers. For that see this IMF paper:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2011/wp1152.pdf
and Ramey (2011)
http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/JEL_Fiscal_14June2011.pdf

Data Source: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2013/01/weodata/index.aspx (To be exact, I selected "Gross domestic product based on purchasing-power-parity (PPP) per capita GDP" and "General government structural balance Percent of potential GDP")


Same as above but without Greece. p = 0.81; y=0.8819 + 0.1973*x (Euro)

Takeaways: Fiscal multiplier closer to zero, but this is odd. Are the effects of ECB's monetary policy disproportionally bad for Greece? Anything to do with structural account surpluses/deficits? (Export/import ratios)


And here's a graph moving Hong Kong and Switzerland to the non-independent side on account of their monetary pegs at the time, although whether or not we ought to do this is open for debate.

And I can't see a single white student. Fuck me, what's happening to my country?

After just 45 minutes.

Greece and its creditors hardened their stances on Monday after the collapse of talks aimed at preventing a default and possible euro exit, prompting Germany's EU commissioner to say the time had come to prepare for a "state of emergency".

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras ignored pleas from European leaders to act fast. Instead he blamed creditors for Sunday's breakdown of the cash-for-reform talks, the biggest setback in long-running negotiations to unlock aid. He said his government had a responsibility to defend Greece's dignity and would resist demands for further pension cuts.

"It is not a matter of ideological stubbornness. It has to do with democracy," said the 40-year-old leftist, who was elected on a pledge to end austerity.

Athens now has just two weeks to find a way out of the impasse before it faces a 1.6 billion euro repayment due to the International Monetary Fund, potentially leaving it out of cash, unable to borrow and dangling on the edge of the currency area.

Germany and other creditor nations demanded that Athens come to its senses and offer new proposals.

"It won't work that Greece sets the terms and says 'everyone has to dance to our tune'. Greece needs to get back to reality," Volker Kauder, parliamentary floor leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives, told ARD television.

Belgian Finance Minister Johan Van Overtveldt said the euro zone's credibility would be damaged and radical forces in other countries emboldened if past accords with Greece were changed.

The European Commission said it would only resume mediation efforts if Greece put forward new proposals, while the Greek government spokesman said Athens was sticking to its rejection of wage and pension cuts and higher taxes on basic goods.

"We have largely exhausted our limits," spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis said. Tsipras' office said Greece was ready to restart talks at any time and was waiting for a signal from lenders which could loosen the deadlock.

"If they call us with something new, we may also provide something new," one official said.

A Greek government official denied a German newspaper report that said there were plans for Greece to impose capital controls this weekend if the talks fail. A German government spokesman could not confirm the report.

Despite the deepening crisis, Tsipras is going ahead with a planned visit to Russia from Thursday, the day euro zone finance ministers hold a crucial meeting to review the standoff with Greece. He is due to stay till Saturday, attend an economic forum in Saint Petersburg and meet President Vladimir Putin.

EU officials said that without improved Greek proposals by Thursday, the Eurogroup session would be very tough and was likely to present Greece with an ultimatum.

"No more new proposals; take it or leave it time is upon us, I think. Or very close." one euro zone official said.

While there was little outward sign of panic in Athens as Greeks held out hope for a last-minute solution - a familiar theme in five years of crisis - the latest impasse triggered a selloff in European and Asian shares and weighed on the euro.

Greek banks suffered deposit outflows of about 400 million euros ($449 million) on Monday as the pace of daily withdrawals picked up from last week, bankers said.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said the ECB would keep approving emergency lending to Greek banks as long as they remained solvent but would monitor closely whether they had sufficient collateral.

Draghi stressed in testimony to the European Parliament it was up to elected politicians, not to central bankers, to decide on Greece's fate and the ECB could not allow its liquidity to be used illegally to finance the Greek government.

"While all actors will now need to go the extra mile, the ball lies squarely in the camp of the Greek government to take the necessary steps," Draghi said.

Greece will doom us all.

Gotta love London.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JELrW25v3G8

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

fucking rekt

http://serialkillers.com/

Nicking SecondClass's idea.

Because it's 5.30am and I haven't slept. I'm waiting for the store to open down the road so I can buy some death sticks.

Shoot.

This is why Britain needs to bring back the gallows.

i get it now

Just shortly on Piketty, since his only really notable work was Capital, it's worth noting that most of what he wrote was essentially wrong. Not only were there methodological issues on his spreadsheets which include transcription errors and incorrect formulae which skew his sources, but MIT graduate Matthew Rognlie took another look at the data and found that almost all of the increasing share of domestic income going to capital was from rising rent on residential real estate. As far as I know, Piketty hasn't addressed these criticisms adequately.

Now. . . On to Chang. Chang is an incredibly poor reflection on Cambridge's economics course; I can't recall a single thing I've read by him that had actual data and analysis, instead he fills up his books with ideological buzzwords and tenuous links. Just take this line from one of Chang's websites promoting a book of his: "Contrary to what most economists would have you believe, there isn’t just one kind of economics – Neoclassical economics. In fact there are no less than nine different kinds, or schools, as they are often known. And none of these schools can claim superiority over others and still less monopoly over truth."

This is just utter nonsense on the face of it. Economics is not just guesswork, and certain schools can absolutely take superiority over others. He even includes a cute little chart, which is definitionally wrong. Chang is either being stupid or dishonest here (even before we've gotten to the actual economics!) because the schools are simply not delineated like this. It makes no sense.

Classical economics became neoclassical economics
"Neoclassical economics" isn't particularly well-defined anyway
"Schumpeterian" is a branch of growth theory
"Keynesian" is a branch of business cycle theory
"Behavioral" is a branch of microeconomics

All five of those "schools" (at minimum!) are basically mutually consistent. I could write down a New Keynesian business-cycle model with habit formation and a quality ladder, and there you have all five of those "schools." There's just no way you can possibly think schools are "schools" in the hard-and-fast sense. If you want to go by Chang's chart, I'm a I'm a Neoclassical-Keynesian-Schumpeterian with an affliction for Behaviouralism.

On that front, I see the world as basically and broadly, but substantially, mimicking an Arrow-Debreu-Radner equilibrium (read: the laissez-faire world). Maybe 75% of the economy works well along those lines. However, crucially, there are some badly incomplete markets and there is substantially incomplete information on the part of many market participants. Firms have enough market power to make sticky prices and monetary policy important for macro fluctuations. Financial markets and insurance markets are substantially incomplete. Some segments of the labor market badly fail to meet the conditions of Pareto efficient contracts between workers and employers. What does this imply for policy?

Governments can usefully step in to fill the space left by incomplete insurance markets. Governments can usefully step in to design laws that minimize the costly enforcement problems that plague financial markets. Governments can usefully step in to write sensible contract, tort, and property law which aids the public's daily ability to go about their business. Governments can usefully step in to design laws that improve workers' position at the wage bargaining table. Governments can step in with transfer payments to those who are least well off. Monetary policy makers can minimize the ill effects of inflation and rigid prices. Statistical agencies can publish information to curb the problems of imperfect information and costly information processing.

I've read his book Bad Samaritans and it's completely awful. He claims many institutions push conservative theories over liberal-Left theories.

Many institutions push correct theories (like free trade and globalization as being positive things for the poor and developing countries as well as developed and rich countries) while he and a vocal minority rail against it and use the word "neoliberal" in every other sentence. Chang completely ignores this, going insofar as to claim Hong Kong is the "exception" to his rule. If memory serves, Chang has also occasionally doubted the sloping nature of the demand-supply curves, despite the fact that this has been settled since Smith's 1962 paper. It's akin to doubting the nominal rigidity of wages.

Chang has relentlessly and unapologetically tried to pull economics into the real of politics (more than it already fucking is), and out of the social sciences. He's either dishonest, idiotic or both. Don't even get me started on Twenty-one Things They Didn't Tell You About Capitalism, either. He completely ignores how shitty all economies have become when they tried to achieve autarky and completely ignores endogenous growth models in Bad Samaritans and refuses to acknowledge the technological benefits of trade despite the fact it has been evident since the Middle Ages.

In the end, Chang is a politicised hack. You know what they call alternative medicine which actually works? Medicine. Similarly, do you know what they call heterodox economics which is coherent and backed by the empirics? Economics.

Breitbart.

One of the most frustrating things about debating feminists and feminist academics is how readily they reach for words such as “abuse,” “harassment” and “safety” – particularly, it seems, when they are losing the argument.

Yesterday I debated Dr Emily Grossman on women in science and, sure as night follows day, she reached for the same vocabulary afterwards, claiming on Twitter that she was “absolutely reeling” from the “mysogynistic [sic] backlash” and that she “hadn’t quite realised the extent of #everydaysexism.”

That troubled me, because I hear this allegation a lot and I wouldn’t like to think that just because I have a large and enthusiastic fan base that women will stop debating me on important topics because of the bigoted social media backlash that follows.

For instance, I debated left-wing comedian Kate Smurthwaite on the BBC’s Big Questions a while ago and she, too, claimed that a barrage of hateful and misogynistic comments arrived on her doorstep after she lost her temper during the discussion. That time, once again, I couldn’t find an example of what she was talking about, and she wasn’t able to produce more than one or two decidedly contentious instances.

It seems mean-spirited to fact-check when a woman claim she feels attacked, but so often are important discussions shut down by these sorts of claims I thought it might be worth looking into this example, since Grossman is one of the more calm, respectable and erudite opponents I’ve been put up against. I’m also troubled by the “guilt by association” tactic some opponents use – Smurthwaite in particular.

It seemed highly unlikely to me that someone as distinguished as Grossman would simply concoct allegations for sympathy on social media because she felt unhappy about the way the debate had gone. I messaged Grossman, asking her for examples of misogynistic tweets so I could name and shame the perpetrators. She declined to provide any.

So, in the interests of fairness and thoroughness, I did what I guess any feisty feminist academic would do in the situation: I had a researcher go through the tweets she received yesterday. All of them, in fact: 567 tweets and counting, as we go to press. It took a while.

Of the 567 tweets we examined, many were supportive. Many, of course, challenge her and discuss her debate performance.

We found no instances of outright misogyny, though there were of course plenty of boisterous comments and lots of criticism of Grossman’s arguments. There were a few obliging comments about her looks, as there were about mine, but I presume Grossman is mature and sensible enough to take compliments as intended.

This is particularly weird because Grossman claims she retweeted the worst of the abuse. Yet an inspection of her Twitter feed reveals little in the way of hateful invective.

There was a little trolling and some slight meanness. I think anyone in the public eye is used to getting disobliging comments. It would be a shame to think that women find the slightest criticism grounds for complaint – though, of course, if you accept Dr Grossman’s view, in the video above, that women are delicate, fragile creatures, I suppose it’s possible she is practising what she preaches.

As is so often the case, the most robust criticism of the feminist position came from other women: in particular, yesterday, from an animator called Chloe Price, who objected to Grossman’s arguments that women need special treatment in order to survive in competitive environments.

Price’s critique is strongly-worded, but it’s a stretch to accuse another woman of misogyny.

There is always the possibility that somehow the worst of the harassment was deleted between being sent and our analysis. But this seems unlikely: a contemporary tweet from an observer also claims that no harassment or abuse could be located at the time.

Our conclusion was that her claims are unfounded. (I suppose it would be cheap to observe that had Grossman really experienced the levels of “misogyny” she claims, she might be able to spell it.) In fact, the tweets directed at her were remarkably tame, by internet standards, particularly since she purposefully goads readers at several points: for example, by retweeting a comment about “pathetic and threatened men.”

The most charitable interpretation available is that Grossman, who was making jokes off-air in the studio about crying, abruptly lost her sense of humour when she sensed political advantage, retweeting comments like this that were clearly harmless in the context of the debate, during which crying was mentioned repeatedly.

We could find perhaps three tweets that crossed the line – but this is debatable. Even these three were not abusive or hectoring, per se, but they lacked the lightness of touch and good nature of the majority of criticism and could, if we were interpreting very generously, be seen as overly mean.

As you can see, any sexism on display is closer to Jack Kennedy than Jack the Ripper. And when you compare it to tweets I received, they pale. (Appearing on television to question feminist dogma is tantamount to blasphemy on social media: I’ll spare you the names I’m called on a daily basis.)

As it happens, the only instance of outright sexism we could find was from one of Grossman’s supporters: a gay man who complained that the presenter, Kay Burley, habitually “fawns over” blokes in a since-deleted tweet. (Grossman retweeted one of his other remarks.) When challenged, the individual admitted he rarely watches Sky News.

To those of us watching the antics of feminists and feminist academics, it can be tough to escape the conclusion that they deploy the word “misogyny” simply to indicate disagreement, and perhaps as a signal to white knights that they need backup because their arguments are failing.

That does other women a disservice, I think, because, as with racism, homophobia and all the other accusations of bigotry those of us on the right have to duck and weave around, over-used words lose their power to shock – and, ultimately, to damage. Just like all those fake rape claims on American campuses at the moment.

Which means that the next time someone really is unacceptably rude to a woman solely because of her gender, bystanders will be less affected by it and less likely to come to her aid and censure the offending tweeters.

Much of this, in the end, comes down to interpretation. Certainly, it can be disorientating and distressing when a television performance does not go as planned and one receives a lot of negative comments. But is criticism of a woman intrinsically different to criticism of a man? If you believe, as Grossman apparently does, that women need to be treated with kid gloves because they can’t handle challenges like men can, then perhaps you will find some of the tweets directed at her to be unacceptable.

But it seems a high bar to set a man who wants to debate a woman, that he should not only give her special dispensation in the debate itself but police the activity of every one of his (in this instance) 50,000 Twitter followers, and somehow insulate her from the joyful, irreverent style of internet commentators at large.

Grossman is a beautiful, accomplished and articulate woman, and we had a thought-provoking, spirited debate. What I don’t understand is: why did she feel the need to cook up charges of woman-hating afterwards? We are awaiting comment.

The fringe ain't so fringe-y.

a sexy lumberjack