- Robert Lucas, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and 1995 Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote a welcome defense of the predictive power of economics-as-it-is, on occasion of The Economist’s recent criticism on the discipline.
- Lord Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’s biographer and Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, also argues in defence of economics in spite of the Queen’s interpellation to the discipline. Here you can read it in the Financial Times and here in his personal website.
- An interesting article in the NYT on statistics as a profession that faces growing demand and even better salaries.
- A neat note in The Economist on “The Slide to Protectionism in the Great Depression: Who Succumbed and Why“, an NBER working paper by Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science in the University of California at Berkeley, and Douglas Irwin, Professor of Arts and Sciences in Dartmouth College.
- An article in The Economist on a new Museum of Handbags and Purses in Amsterdam, with historical evidence of the non-metrosexuality of male purses. Here’s an excerpt:
The very first object on display—the oldest in the collection—proves that man bags are nothing new. It is a 16th-century pouch made of creamy white kid skin. The surface is decorated with rosettes and 18 tiny pockets of the same soft leather. It was probably made for a travelling merchant. At the time men’s clothes did not have pockets, and the bag provided a quickly accessible sorting system for multiple currencies, each pocket reserved for the coins of a particular city.
That’s it for now. I can’t wait to read Ben’s opinion on the WEHC in Utrecht.
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