I can't wait to find out what the green taco bells do.

Ad astra per aspera

Over the weekend, appoximately 190,000 people made their way to Worthy Farm in western England to attend the 2009 Glastonbury Festival. Attendees came to see performances at what is billed as "Europe's largest open-air music festival" on many stages over four days - headliners included Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and a reunited Blur. Rainy weather did little to dampen the mood, as attendees enjoyed themselves in tent cities, concert performances, dance tents, and the surrounding countryside of Somerset, England. Collected here are a handful of images from this year's festival.

Anyone remember the fate of Kazaa? I have a bad feeling about this.

you are the media you consume.

Until three years ago, the oldest company in the world was the construction company Kongo Gumi, headquartered in Osaka, Japan. Kongo Gumi was founded in 578 CE when the then-regent of Japan, Prince Shotoku, brought a member of the Kongo family from Korea to Japan to help construct the first Buddhist temple in Japan, the Shitenno-ji. The Kongo Gumi continued in the construction trade for almost one and a half thousand years. In 2005, they were headed by Masakazu Kongo, the 40th of his family to head Kongo Gumi. The company had more than 100 employees, and 70 million dollars in revenue. But in 2006, Kongo Gumi went into liquidation, and its assets were purchased by Takamatsu Corporation. Kongo Gumi as an independent entity no longer exists.

And apparently Zafon is refusing to sell the rights to make it a movie - which gives him props for personality.

What else is being read around here for light reading?

Perhaps not to be watched while eating or for those with a queasy stomach.

So, what would this be? Place your bets now...

A CHILD was pulled alive from rough seas after a Yemeni Airbus A310 jet carrying 153 people crashed as it came in to land in the Indian Ocean island nation of Comoros yesterday.

It was the second time in less than a month that an Airbus had crashed into the ocean, and immediately there were calls by the EU for a worldwide blacklist of unsafe airlines.

French authorities said the Yemeni carrier had been under surveillance and that problems had been reported with the jet.

H/T to my friend Spoonman.

Skennah Kowa

A train in front of the Weserwind factory where foundations for BARD turbines are being built.

Just on the other side, the 6 Multibrid turbines for the Alpha Ventus project (the first German offshore project):

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

This incredible French production (Luc Besson produced) makes visual what the data represent on climate change we here discuss and debate.  Simplistic but beautiful.  it's trying to spark a movement, saying we have ten years to change our culture.

But before a discussion, it's important to know whether the meme's spread here.

HOME

Skennah Kowa

A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds; a man of deeds and not of words is like a garden full of turds — Anonymous

And as I pointed out a long time ago, many economists just don't know this stuff. Even in macroeconomics, you could build a career without ever understanding what Keynes and Hicks were driving at -- and if you're under a certain age, perhaps without even ever having heard about it. Arguments like "deficits drive up interest rates and that's contractionary" basically have the feel of someone who doesn't have any sense of how the pieces fit together -- probably because they don't.

Krugman: THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MACRO

Here's the problem: Macro I (that's 14.451 in MIT lingo) is a quarter course, which is supposed to cover the "workhorse" models of the field - the standard approaches that everyone is supposed to know, the models that underlie discussion at, say, the Fed, Treasury, and the IMF. In particular, it is supposed to provide an overview of such items as the IS-LM model of monetary and fiscal policy, the AS-AD approach to short-run versus long-run analysis, and so on. By the standards of modern macro theory, this is crude and simplistic stuff, so you might think that any trained macroeconomist could teach it. But it turns out that that isn't true.

You see, younger macroeconomists - say, those under 40 or so - by and large don't know this stuff. Their teachers regarded such constructs as the IS-LM model as too ad hoc, too simplistic, even to be worth teaching - after all, they could not serve as the basis for a dissertation. Now our younger macro people are certainly very smart, and could learn the material in order to teach it - but they would find it strange, even repugnant. So in order to teach this course MIT has relied, for as long as I can remember, on economists who learned old-fashioned macro before it came to be regarded with contempt. For a variety of reasons, however, we can't turn to the usual suspects this year: Stan Fischer has left to run the world, Rudi Dornbusch is otherwise occupied, Olivier Blanchard is department head, Ricardo Caballero - who is a bit young for the role, but can swallow his distaste if necessary - is on leave. All of which leaves me.

...

Why does the old-fashioned stuff persist in this way? I don't think the answer is intellectual conservatism. Economists, in fact, are in general neophiles, always looking for something radical and different. Anyway, I have seen over and over again how young economists, trained to regard IS-LM and all that with contempt if they even know what it is, find themselves turning to it after a few years in Washington or New York. There's something about primeval macro that pulls us back to it; if Hicks hadn't invented IS-LM in 1937, we would end up inventing it all over again.

But what is it that makes old-fashioned macro so compelling? To answer that question, I find it helpful to think about where it came from in the first place.

...

Sixty years on, the intellectual problems with doing macro this way are well known. First of all, the idea of treating money as an ordinary good begs many questions: surely money plays a special sort of role in the economy. Second, almost all the decisions that presumably underlie the schedules here involve choices over time: this is true of investment, consumption, even money demand. So there is something not quite right about pretending that prices and interest rates are determined by a static equilibrium problem. (Of course, Hicks knew about that, and was quite self-conscious about the limitations of his "temporary equilibrium" method). Finally, sticky prices play a crucial role in converting this into a theory of real economic fluctuations; while I regard the evidence for such stickiness as overwhelming, the assumption of at least temporarily rigid nominal prices is one of those things that works beautifully in practice but very badly in theory.

But step back from the controversies, and put yourself in the position of someone who must reach a judgement about the likely impact of a change in monetary policy, or an investment slump, or a fiscal expansion. It would be cumbersome to try, every time, to write out an intertemporal-maximization framework, with microfoundations for money and price behavior, and try to map that into the limited data available. Surely you will find yourself trying to keep track of as few things as possible, to devise a working model - a scratchpad for your thoughts - that respects the essential adding-up constraints, that represents the motives and behavior of individuals in a sensible way, yet has no superfluous moving parts. And that is what the quasi-static, goods-bonds-money model is - and that is why old-fashioned macro, which is basically about that model, remains so useful a tool for practical policy analysis.

But it's ok, he got a clean conscious, and has national front page scoops under his belt, money and fame courtesy the house organ!

He just figured things were getting a bit sinister recently.

Comment tree view (the little arrows to collapse/expand the comment threads) no longer work for me, since a couple of days. Haven't changed anything to my profile or my firefox. My stupid organization may have made stupid changes to the proxy/firewalls though. But no site other than Eurotrib has changed in any way recently.

Anyone seen the same problem ?

Pierre