Articles on the (fortunately very intense) debate between economists about economists - quite self referential but for this reason, very hopping!

Mark Thoma has collected a number of articles on the debate about the economics science that the current crisis has spurred. You can find them here. Bon appetit!

Groupthink

A very interesting perspective on the failure of the FED to foresee the housing bubble and its dire repercussions by Robert Shiller, a Yale economist, can be found here.

Success is Social

“Outliers: The Story of Success” is a popular science book by MALCOLM GLADWELL who contends that success in not entirely due to individual actions. The social environment and the initial conditions play an important role in the success of the individual. Things like the month of birth may matter!

I think this book may be worth reading at least in order to lower our ego and take a different perspective at our individualistic society.

You can find a review of the book here.

Left Brained and Right Brained Executives

In a recent article in Economist Jeremy Grantham, an investor, contends that insolvent banks had an overabundance of left brained executives but scarcity of right brained ones. Left brain skills are acording to Grantham: "focus, hard work, decisiveness, persuasiveness, political skills, and, if you are lucky, analytical skills and charisma " while right brained people are :"more intuitive, more given to developing odd theories, wallowing in historical data, and taking their time. They are almost universally interested—even obsessed—with outlier events, and unique, new, and different combinations of factors". Businesses require both of these skills in their executive boards. Their functions are complementary. Unfortunatelly, the board members didn't have the same opinion favoring excecutives whith everyday problem solving efficiency but with long term strategic insight deficiency. I don't know if this theory is well substantiated if any. However,it seems rather plausible and quite appealing to my right brained idiosyncracy :-).

You can find the article here

Interesting data from the US economy

Here you can find charts on 7 economic indices of the US economy for the last sixty years.

Some interestig comments for the data:

The savings of the US households as a percent of the real income is declining. However in the same period the interest rates are kept in the same level.

Under the presidency of Reagan and George W. Bush both advocates of minimum intervention in the markets and minimum role of the government, the USA run big budget deficits.

The inequalities in USA are escalating in the last 2 and a half decades.

A consise history of modern finance

Here you can find an article in this week's economist on the history of modern finance.

Crises and the Dispersion of INFO

Here you can find the research summary of George-Marios Angeletos, the economist of the month.
His work is concentrated in the role of information during crises and the multiplicity of equilibria in global games where complementarities exist between the agents. His research is even more interesting now that we are in the middle of a crisis and the central problem seems to be information asymmetries. I am inclined to believe that Marios will be the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal in one of the following years. I have enormous respect for him.