Richard Neuhaus, RIP

There are many religious blogs and sites on the Internet, but most of them are not very good. One of the ones that I like a lot is firstthings.com, which represents an organization founded by Fr. Richard Neuhaus. Fr. Neuhaus recently died, and there was a touching post about his life on the Commentary blog.
Update: Found this quotation from Fr. Neuhaus on the proteinwisdom blog:

Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion.

Obama on the recession

An AP story reports:

President-elect Barack Obama said Thursday the recession could "linger for years" unless Congress pumps unprecedented sums from Washington into the economy.

That is a very Keynesian view, a belief that the economy lacks strong stabilizing forces. I live in the other camp, the camp that thinks that the economy has strong stabilizing forces over a period of a few years, and the greatest danger is destabilization from the government. What is rather odd is that both views look to the Great Depression for support.

A dissenting view

Casey Mulligan offers a dissenting view on the current financial crisis and recession, arguing that the problems have been grossly overhyped. He makes the comparison to the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) story in Iraq, a fear the prompted action that never would have been taken otherwise. He says that the fear of economic catastrophe has driven policy, but as in the case of WMD, there is little evidence that the fear is justified. He even suggests that GDP in the fourth quarter may increase. Check out his blog.

Gullibility and Madoff

In a long but fascinating article about gullibility, Steven Greenspan explains how he invested a large amount of money with Bernie Madoff. He even talks about feedback in several places.

Mr. Shiller employs a social psychological explanation that he terms the "feedback loop theory of investor bubbles." Simply stated, the fact that so many people seem to be making big profits on the investment, and telling others about their good fortune, makes the investment seem safe and too good to pass up.

Am I a paid mouthpiece for Marxism and Socialism?

I got some fan mail today.

Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:56:02 -0700
Subject: Your Keynesian website

Dear Robert,

Since I recently became heavily involved in Austrian Economics and engage in activist-activities by publicly showing Mises videos, I decided to look for information Keynesian theory to learn more about the horror of their theory.

I have to say, that there doesn't seem to be any evidence of government intervention that results in prosperity.

Do you really believe you are making a correct scholarly legitimate argument for Keynesian theory, or are you a paid mouthpiece for Marxism and Socialism while living off the dole?

Just curious.

Regards,
Jesse Thomas

Re: http://ingrimayne.com/econ/Keynes/Paradox.html

I guess he did not get to the Fiscal Policy Today chapter.

Global warming at Huffington

There is an article debunking global warming at the Huffington Post, of all places. It has lots of comments. And, of course, it discusses feedback, which is the central issue of global warming debates.

Macroeconomic ramblings

I occasionally visit the chicagoboyz , and last night I found two good posts. One was about private equity funds and whether or not they had a future. The other was a link to site that I had never heard of, neptunuslex, where there was an interesting discussion on the current economic mess. The conversation was polite, and though there were some who wanted to blame everything on greed (which is sort of like blaming airplane crashes on gravity), there were insightful comments from OldTFlyer and especially Bob. Of course, the fact that I think their comments were insightful basically means that I agree with them. Bob was worried that the current mess may lead to policy that really fouls things up.

Microeconomics is unified by the concepts of economic efficiency and rational choice. There is no similiar unifying concept for macroeconomcis. I wonder if there has not been too much effort to force macroeconomics into equilibrium analysis when in fact it is basically disequilibrium analysis. The Samuelson cross, usually called the Keynesian cross, was an early attempt to make give it a supply-and-demand structure. Other attempts have been ISLM and the aggregate-supply, aggregate-demand framework. If I could set the framework, it would be a shock and feedback framework. To some extent that has emerged, but there still is too much emphasis on equilibrium and not enough on feedback.

One of the variables likely to change for the better in a few weeks is the reporting from the press. Because such a large part of it hates Bush and loves Obama, the glass will suddenly become half full rather than half empty. I wonder if anyone has explored the influence of the press on business activity. The press does not merely report, but they also shape news and perceptions, which is one of the prime attractions of being a member of the press.

Enough rambling for today.

The press and bloggers

Glen Reynolds at instapundit writes about the relationship between the old media press and bloggers with a number of interesting links.

Who forecast the housing bubble?

Bruce Bartlett writes in Forbes about who did and who did not see the housing bubble while it was forming.

There were many economists who did see it coming, but there were many others of equal or greater prominence and authority who repeatedly insisted that there was nothing to worry about.

I recognized that there was a housing bubble on the coasts two or three years ago, but I was totally unaware of (and uninterested in) the consequences of that bubble bursting. It was all too far away. If I had given more thought to the implications of the bubble bursting, I would have made smarter decisions in the past year.

Some statistics

I was showing my son some statistics about this blog a few days ago and he noticed that it had over 1000 page views. Since my normal traffic is about 4 per day, I had to find out what was happening. I found the answer here.

A few days earlier I had some publicity for another blog I write in the Lafayette Journal and Courier. The effect of this newspaper publicity was not clearly visible on sitemeter.com (which is not available to the public). My conclusion: if you want more online traffic, online publicity is far more effective than old media publicity.

About a month ago I put cluster maps on both my cybereconomics blog and on my cybereconomics textbook table of contents. My map on the blog now represents viewers who found me via Megan McArdle. They are almost entirely from the U.S. In contrast, my free textbook has a large number of viewers from other countries. Quantcast.com says about 40% of the textbook viewers are from outside the U.S.

I suspect that none of this is likely to be of interest to anyone other than to me.

Have a Happy New Year.