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Please watch the Zeitgeist Addendum, and RIP: Remix Manifesto Kafka gave us The Metamorphosis.  We have the power to realize our own humility.  Being wrong is irrelevant if you learn from your mistakes and prevent systemic risk from such errors.  How can we be so content with our wisdom if we...

Via the indispensable Tyler Cowen, a new paper from Johnson and Fowler explores whether overconfidence is, in fact, adaptive. They show that it it is under some very reasonable assumptions.  They model competition for resources as a two-player game and then analyze the evolutionary dynamics of populations...

Also must-read this Sunday is Michael Pollan's NY Times Op-Ed piece from Wednesday.  Nice cap to my week of ranting on the dismantling of rationality when it comes to lifestyle choices that directly impact one's health, here and...

The old philosophical theory says that reason is conscious, can fit the world directly, is universal (we all think the same way), is dispassionate (emotions get in the way of reason), is literal (no metaphor or framing in reason), works by logic, is abstract (not physical) and functions to serve our...

Here is a fascinating discussion on NPR's Forum from earlier this year on the subject of mercury and fish: [audio:http://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/forum/2009/02/2009-02-26b-forum.mp3] If you've listened to this the whole way through (which you should), I'm curious as to how it will affect your...

From the "nothing is quite so simple" department, a Boston Globe article this week points out a hidden legacy of the conservation movement: The expulsion of native peoples from their land. Starting with Yosemite in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the pattern of forcing indigineous civilizations...

With his permission, I am posting an email thread between myself and Alfred Hubler.  I had contacted him on the recommendation of John Miller when Kevin and I were posting on the possibility of dampening boom-bust cycles in the financial markets through policy or other mechanisms.  Here's what Hubler had...

In part 1 I advocated photographing your completed ballot before submitting it and posting your photograph online.  Turns out that if you followed this piece of advice in Missouri, you might be in jail right now.  Oops!  Sorry :-) I'm not even clear whether doing what I did in revealing the contents of...

I don't like the Republican or Libertarian parties. But I'm also no fan of the Democratic party. In fact, I dislike all political parties and think they should be done away with.  And while I'm not naive enough to think that this will happen, it makes me glad to see that the "post partisan" utopia is...

For those of who understand the power of self-fulfilling prophecy, there's some good news on the foreign policy front.  The Obama administration (thanks to Hillary Clinton) will not be using the phrase "war on terror" anymore, as it is widely deemed to be "overly militaristic and perhaps...

George Lakoff wrote an interesting piece on FiveThirtyEight.com yesterday called The Obama Code.  I will focus on one of the sections in particular because it articulates something I've suspected for a while, but I've never heard anyone else give credence to the notion.  Which is that one of the...

Has anyone read the entire text of the stimulus package? The ambiguity of this question is intentional. For those reading this post who have read the entire text, would you please comment on it?  What are the highlights, what are the important hidden details, do you think it will work, whatever you want to...

Kevin has a few threads regarding the effect that micro behaviors have when aggregated to macro behaviors: Society According to Kevin I May Have Been Wrong About Macroeconomics But I Was Probably Right About Climate Models It occurred to me as I was reading this Huffington Post article that there is a...

Click here to see the whole set. hat tip:...

As we approach the inauguration of a new leader who trying to be truly post-partisan, I think Jonathan Haidt's TED brilliant talk is apropos: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc] Haidt posits a sobering reality that we will all have to overcome if Obama is to achieve his goal: Our Righteous...

The Obama Transition team wants your input on how to fix the country: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9xYOlxLK5M] No, seriously.  Check out the various meetings they have upcoming and the comments sections that go with each.  Some topics like Health Care have lots of comments.  Others like the...

Click here for election night...

Back in June, I suggested that public voting records would be healthy for our democracy if the populace were comfortable revealing their voting records.  There is now a movement* and new web site for this called Who Voted? though they are not going as far as I am in advocating for revealing your actual...

As most of you already know, I am an anthropogenic global warming skeptic, aka "denier".  Well, a new paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has turned me into a credit crunch skeptic too. The maintstream narrative on why we need a bailout is that credit is "frozen". We can't just let the...

As we saw in Act I and Act II, the current financial crisis was enabled by government interference in the housing and mortgage markets, then initiated by Wall Street's willful blindness to systematic risk in the MBS market. Now we are observing the government's flailing response. First they bail out Bear...

When the bailout passed, I first thought this post was moot.  But then I reconsidered.  There's still plenty of time to affect the implementation and several lessons to be learned.  Also, when I'm pissed off, it's nice to know that I have a good reason. In Act I, we saw how government meddling overheated...

Let me start by saying that the financial crisis is a very complex situation.  I read several economics blogs every day and quite a few academic papers every month.  My semi-professional opinion is that no economist even comes close to fully understanding the financial system, let alone the complete...

I am a fan of prediction markets.   They have typically done much better than polls at predicting the outcome of elections.  Why?  Here's a thought experiment.  Consider who you think is going to win the election (not who you want to win).  Now consider that I was going to bet you $10,000 of your hard...

So as not to waste my expensive schooling, I still keep up with economics as a hobby.  I don't expect other people to generally share this interest, but it occurred to me that the current financial crisis is an excellent example of what happens when a complex adaptive system experiences a shock.  Is...