but the history of dioxygen difluoride is entertaining.
h/t michael nielsen
No Comment From Me:
As a response, we get something often misattributed to Churchill:
Francois Guisot (1787-1874): “Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.”
New Yorker on Krugman
Very interesting profile via Tyler Cowen, who, I think, dances around the most interesting issues in the article and comments on Krugman’s travel habits and his Sci-Fi love instead. Maybe he’s worried about engaging with the prickly stuff. He teases us, however, with this:
and there is an interesting discussion of how his wife edits his work
Interesting? I’ll say (quotes below are from the New Yorker piece):
these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier.
and this:
On the rare occasion when they disagree about something, she will be the one urging him to be more outraged or recalcitrant.
And he even jumps between grammatical persons when discussing ‘their’ work:
“When Robin and I started writing about health care, single payer was clearly the way to go. And then bit by bit you start saying, ‘O.K., you take what you can get.’ There’s a trap I’ve seen some people fall into—you let your vision of what should be get completely taken over by what appears possible right now—and that’s something I’m trying to avoid.”
Is Krugman’s famed brilliant yet mean-spirited persona really a combination of his and his wife’s views? Is she the mean part and he the brilliant part? Yikes, don’t want to touch that, but we should probably at least consider “Paul Krugman, NYT Columnist” an avatar for the Krugman couple together.
Would Robin Wells still want her avatar to be so angry if it was her name at the top of the column?
Retirement Drives you Crazy
Managing Firms
Separating Issues
I think the island airport is awesome. Porter Airlines runs all the slots right now, which means, yes, they have a monopoly. Air Canada is looking to wipe that out:
Montreal-based Air Canada
launched legal proceedings Wednesday, accusing Porter of having an “improper anti-competitive advantage” at Toronto’s downtown island airport.
I’m sure there are lots of weird details that the public don’t know anything about (why the monopoly in the first place? Why didn’t Air Canada look to develop this airport years earlier? etc), but one thing that irritates me is that people seem to confuse Porter Airlines with the Island Airport. Very different things.
Yes, Porter serves beer on its short haul flights and yes, the lines are shorter at the island airport. But I’d say that most of the sustainably great things about the Porter experience fall under the heading of “Great Things about the Island Airport” and those that are left are possibly unsustainable loss leading marketing gimmicks designed to secure share.
If it’s the airport that gives Porter its edge, then Air Canada should be able to deliver just as great an experience. Right?
The Krugman we love
This is us having the priviledge of reading a Nobel laureate muse on his topic of expertise (no, he’s not a macroeconomist or political analyst).
Inflation
This is from the NYT today on the fed’s move to increase the rate paid on reserves:
“If you perfectly telegraph when you’re going to do it, you might as well do it that day, since so much of interest rate and monetary policy is about expectations,” she said. “It doesn’t matter so much what it is, versus what was expected.”
Maybe I’m reading too much Scott Sumner but I am often concerned that it is a point that people completely miss. Even in the context of the article quoted above, the message is about expectations of the interest rate on reserves or the target rate for the discount window, not inflation, which is the expectation that really matters.
I know that insurance companies don’t give a rat’s ass about what the interest rate is. They pay claims, which are governed by prices, which are sensitive to inflation. It is inflation expectations that will drive insurance rates up, which, of course, fuels ever greater inflation. Are the inflation hawks right? God, who knows, but it isn’t as simple as inflation good, all else, bad.
Careful, now.
Not Unreasonable 