The world according to Facebook.

Here. Explanation here.

Will fiscal policy return to hibernation?

Sometimes the only way to diminish an idea is the try it, to see what happens when it is implemented. Keynesianism was largely irrelevant from the 1970s until George W Bush revived it in his administration, and the Obama administration is crowded with Keynesians. But is this revival supported by the evidence? Michael Boskin said "No" in the Wall Street Journal more than a week ago:

These empirical studies leave many leading economists dubious about the ability of government spending to boost the economy in the short run. Worse, the large long-term costs of debt-financed spending are ignored in most studies of short-run fiscal stimulus and even more so in the political debate.

Only time will tell if we will see Keynesianism again recede. 

One attraction of Keynesian policy is that it lets the government do something and people want the government to do something when there is a problem. There is, however, an asymmetry in how the results are judged. The Obama economists projected a path for unemployment with and without the stimulus program that Congress enacted shortly after Obama became president. Unemployment did not follow the projected path; on the contrary, it has greatly exceeded the path predicted if there were no stimulus. The Keynesians have not acknowledged that this is evidence that their program did not work. Rather they argue it shows that the program was not big enough. They are taken seriously in this response. However, consider what things would look like if the stimulus had not been enacted and unemployment had taken the course that it has taken. Would anyone take seriously the response that the initial shock was bigger than we had realized? Everyone would have concluded that we made a mistake in not passing a stimulus.

There is an incentive for politicians to "do something" in the way the media and the public react to failure. They are more willing to forgive failure or explain it away when the government acts than when the government does not act.

A great start

An article in Forbes begins with this great sentence:

The sovereign debt crisis now threatening Europe, as well as major American states and cities, discloses the sheer incompetence of a political class that has over-promised, under-delivered and squandered vast amounts of their citizens' wealth. 

That really gets to the heart of the matter, doesn't it?

The unfunded pension liabilities of the city of Chicago are $40,000 per household. Things must have looked really bad at the White House for Rahm Emanuel to have quit and gone back to Chicago.

Precocious

From the Wall Street Journal:

A 23-year-old Russian man accused by U.S. authorities of generating nearly a third of the spam e-mails worldwide is expected to be arraigned Friday in a Milwaukee Court.

The quotation is from the article in the print edition, which goes on to say that he used 509,000 infected computers to send as much as 10 billion spam e-mails a day that sold items including fake Rolex watches and counterfeit Viagra.

I am so impressed that I cannot get too angry, even though his operation has cost me wasted time deleting unwanted e-mail messages. At 23 I was unable to earn a living, so I went to graduate school.