Inflation can be a headache for any central banker. But it takes a certain type of economist to know what to do when a belligerent spaceship fleet attacks an interstellar trading post, causing mineral prices to surge across the galaxy.

Eyjólfur Guðmundsson is just that economist. Working for the Icelandic company CCP Games, he oversees the virtual economy of the massively multiplayer video game Eve Online. Within this world, players build their own spaceships and traverse a galaxy of 7,500 star systems. They buy and sell raw materials, creating their own fluctuating markets. They speculate on commodities. They form trade coalitions and banks.

Our real advantage comes from the many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean water gets piped in -- we do not need to remember to add Chlorin to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own -- we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do. ... And perhaps most important, most of us do not have to worry where our next meal will come from. In other words, we rarely need to draw upon our limited endowment of self-control and decisiveness, while the poor are constantly being required to do so.
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As economist Jed Friedman wrote in an online post for the World Bank, "The repeated trade-offs confronting the poor in daily decision making -- i.e. `should I purchase a bit more food or a bit more fertilizer?' -- occupy cognitive resources that would instead lay fallow for the wealthy when confronted with the same decision. The rich can afford both a bit more food and a bit more fertilizer, no decision is necessary."

The point here isn't that Romney is unfamiliar with cutting-edge work in cognitive psychology. It's that he misses even the intuitive message of this work, the part most of us know without reading any studies: It's really, really hard to be poor. That's because the poorer you are, the more personal responsibility you have to take. "

Of all the several good reasons for wearing a bag over your head while voting for the incumbent, curious staffing decisions are one of the more overlooked. Handing the financial sector over to some Wall Street lapdogs. Listening to Bob Rubin on anything. Putting the deficit commission in the hands of lobby-slick Erskine Bowles and the Undead Alan Simpson. But as far as I'm concerned, chief among these reasons has to be the current president's putting the spectacularly overrated Rahm Emanuel in charge of the White House staff. Emanuel hasn't breathed a breath of air in public service when he wasn't a self-aggrandizing and nasty bit of work.

So it was with some glee that I noted on Thursday evening that a judge in Chicago handed Mayor Rahm his head on a stick as regards the "model" response of the mayor and his police force to the Occupy movement in that city. And he did so with a flourish....

Note that Chuka Umunna, the so-called "future of the party", is carrying a copy of the Daily farking Mail around. Now, while I can imagine the more charitable suggesting this as a know-thine-enemy device, personally it looks far too well-thumbed to have been anything other than read for the pleasure of indulging like-minded souls.

He isn't the future of the party, he's a Podcast of Tony Blair from the mid noughties on permanent rewind and all I see in his future is a vision of him flouncing off to the Lib dems

keep to the Fen Causeway

Dark, devious and devilish, JK Rowling's first post-Potter novel, The Casual Vacancy, reads like an episode of Postman Pat written by the makers of The League of Gentlemen. The fictional village of Pagford is a contemporary Cranford, sizzling with the malice of small minds. Yet critics have been just as foul-mouthed as Rowling's meanest characters. Some have described the way it swings from openly abusive relationships and grinding poverty to the easy suburban comedy of golf clubs and local scheming as cartoonish and unsubtle. The Daily Mail thought it was "a socialist manifesto, masquerading as literature", while the Sunday Times questioned why Rowling "seems so down on middle-class values".

Rowling's books, including Potter, certainly reflect the claustrophobia of identikit suburbia, whether it be (fictional) Little Whingeing, where Harry grew up, or (real) Chipping Sodbury, where she spent time herself. But what bites most keenly is the hypocrisy of those places, something she is uniquely placed to understand and convey: as she commented in her Front Row interview with Mark Lawson last week, she has had experience of living at almost every point on the social scale, from lower middle-class suburban boredom to "being as poor as you can be without being homeless" to extreme wealth. When poor, she was treated as invisible; with increasing wealth has come an outer perception of increasing respectability.
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The novel has been accused by the Telegraph of being at its weakest when it is "angrily political" - meaning that Rowling dares to criticise the class divisions in society and examine the injustice, inequality, hypocrisy and prejudice which keep them in place. The criticism is the bleat of people who think of themselves as neutral, apolitical and commonsense but are fiercely political in defence of their own privilege. The same people who happily swallow the extreme snobbery of Downton Abbey or laugh at those they label "chavs" and "hoodies" get angry when the arrow hits closer to home.

Len McCluskey is the leader of the UK's lrgest union. It is rather difficult to trck down transcripts of his speech, so here is  short passage from the Guardian. What's distressing is the extent to which even these self evident ideas are dismissed by the leadership

A public spending squeeze while the City continues to let rip is simply not acceptable. Asking the poorest for further sacrifices for a crisis they did not cause is the road to political ruin and defeat at the next election.

It is time for Labour to once-and-for-all turn its back on the neo-liberalism of the past. Reject the siren voices, Ed.

He also said that asking workers to choose between "jobs or wages" was a false choice

* He said the last Labour government "put too much faith in an unregulated City and allowed inequality to worsen".

... whereas Yglesias praises Bernanke on a fairly narrow point -- the fact that Bernanke promised to keep rates low even after the economy improved -- what we liked about the speech was the sheer volume of myths and misconceptions that he debunked or clarified in a short period of time.

Myths about the Fed are legion (repeated ad nauseam by pundits and politicians) and it seems that Bernanke realizes that the more exotic Fed policy becomes, the more he must inevitably debunk memes in order to justify his actions. Lowering rates during normal times is fairly uncontroversial and easy to understand. Buying bonds on an unlimited basis while indicating that rates will be kept low for years requires some 'splaining. Today's mythbusting is an extension of something he did at his September 14 press conference, when before the Q&A he specifically addressed three key points.

...

Bernanke needs to do more of this: Debunking myths about savers, currency, fiscal policy enabling, monetizing the debt, creating inflation, and operating in secrecy. Bravo.

Bad bankers warned: repent or go to jail

keep to the Fen Causeway

"In a head on collision last night, in which 2 "wild other things" ran into the road, 2 men in their 40′s were killed.

The accident took place in the area between Tapuach and Migdalim in the Shomron.  Magen David Adom's attempts failed to save the wounded, and doctors pronounced the men dead on the scene.  MDA reported that next to the car were 2 dead "wild other things" and it is assumed they caused the fatal accident.

That's right.

Hamodia would not write the word "boar," presumably because a boar is a pig, and pigs, chazzer, are the paradigm non-kosher animals.

Apple's smartphone market share in Israel has suffered another potential blow, following public censure by one of the most senior haredi rabbis in the country.

Rabbi Haim Kanievsky, who ranks in some estimations among the five most influential rabbinic authorities, issued a public notice on Sunday saying that anyone who owns the company's iPhone device should burn it.

In the pronouncement, published on the front page of Yated Ne'eman - the most influential haredi newspaper - as well as several other ultra-Orthodox dailies, Kanievsky said it was forbidden to own an iPhone, comparing the device to weapons of war in its potential to cause harm.