NoApparentMotive

Several of my coworkers at CEPR have started a new blog on Haiti. From the inaugural post: the blog "...will keep track of current efforts at relief and reconstruction with an eye towards ensuring that such efforts are oriented toward the most urgent and important needs of the Haitian people, and that aid is not used to undermine Haitians' right to self-determination."

Other posts cover the threat of the coming rainy season, proposals to cancel Haiti's external debt, and the lack of Haitian voices in Washington's discussions about relief and reconstruction.

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Doug "Fresh" McLean, the smart, big-hearted, young man who made such an amazing impression in the documentary "First Person", died on January 14, a few months shy of his 23rd birthday.

You can make a contribution in Doug's name to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southeastern Pennsylvania. (Make out the check to "Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southeastern Pennsylvania", write "In Honor of Douglas McLean" on the memo line, and mail to: Big Brothers Big Sisters Southeastern Pennsylvania, 123 S. Broad Street, Suite 2180, Philadelphia, PA 19109. Or, you can donate online here --and be sure to scroll all the way down to the "Special Instructions" box to indicate that the donation is in honor of Doug McLean.)

You can also honor Doug by seeing "First Person", Ben Herold's award-winning documentary about six Philadelphia public high school kids trying to make it to college.

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This morning CEPR released a new report I wrote on "The Unions of the States". The study reviews the size and composition of the unionized workforce across the 50 states and the District of Columbia, and provides estimates of the pay and benefits advantage for union workers in each state.

This graph from the report shows the total size of the unionized workforce in each of the states:

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Everyone knows that the electoral college system weights the votes of some American citizens much more heavily than it does the votes of others. States with small populations have a much higher ratio of electoral votes per eligible voter than larger states do. One solution? Abolish the electoral college.

Neil Freeman at FakeIsTheNewReal.com offers another: redraw state boundaries so that each of the 50 new states has a roughly equal population (of about six million people each).

And --as a bonus-- it looks like DC residents get some form of statehood out of the deal!

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AH and BZ have pointed me in the direction of the "Learning R" blog, which focuses almost entirely on using the ggplot2 plotting system in the free statistical package "R" to create graphs.

Lots of examples, lots of code, and lots of good discussion.

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You can follow the PEN-L listserv of progressive economists at Nabble.

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Ezra Klein is pissed. He has been a leading voice on the center-left for passing the less-than-perfect health care reform package that has come out of Congress, but is now calling for Democratic voters to stay home in November if the White House and the Congressional leadership do not make health care reform happen, and pronto.

Klein: "My basic position is that politics is a marketplace like any other, and preferences need to be known. If Democrats decide to drop something this important to the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings because they lost a special election in Massachusetts, they should be punished in the sole way this marketplace allows."

Klein again: "We all agree that there is some point at which the base should abandon the party, at least for a single election cycle."

There is plenty of time before November for the Obama administration to win back Klein and others who have gone out on a limb to defend an important, if deeply flawed, reform. But, man, you know Obama is in a bad place when Ezra Klein is organizing a "Nader for Congress 2010" campaign, and health care reform is what drove him to it.

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Dean Baker and I have a short new paper out today that puts the cost of the Great Recession at more than $1 trillion in lost wages and salaries. The scariest part is that the losses so far in 2008 and 2009 are less than one-third of the total losses through 2012. According to our estimates --which take into account the effects of the economic stimulus plan passed early this year-- earnings losses next year will be about 25 percent bigger than they were this year; 2011 will also be a bit worse than 2009 has been.

Nothing that a massive commitment to job creation couldn't solve, but there doesn't seem to be much of a political consensus on this. Let's hope today's White House Jobs Summit helps to focus some minds.

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American University economics professor Robert Blecker points me in the direction of "El placer de disentir", an excellent blog by economist Gerardo Esquivel on the Mexican economy and politics.

A post today notes that an international rating agency has downgraded Mexican sovereign debt, citing a host of economic problems facing the country. Esquivel comments that seven of the eight reasons cited (including high dependence on oil, weak public finances, and slower economic growth than the rest of the region) are ongoing structural problems that should have been built into the agency's rating all along. (I was struck by how many of the negative factors essentially represent a critique --from the left-- of Mexican macroeconomic policy: lack of a credible countercyclical economic plan and the likely inability to raise tax revenues in the future, for example.)

A post from last week compiles several recent foreign news stories on Mexico, including a depressing piece by Philip Caputo in the current issue of The Atlantic on "The Fall of Mexico" and a story on "reverse remittances" --the poor in Mexico sending money to their struggling relatives in the United States-- that appeared in the New York Times in mid-November.

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A while back, I stumbled across a reference to the first ever internet post announcing the availability of what would come to be known as the Linux kernel.

Just 18 years ago, Linus Benedict Torvalds posted notification of a "Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT" on the comp.os.minix newsgroup.

Here's the original post in its entirety.

The part that most caught my eye:

GNU/Linux is the operating system that now runs a good chunk of the world's computers, including the one I'm typing on right now, the ones that host this website, the ones I use everyday at work, and an enormous portion of those at Google.

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My sister emailed me this tremendous Youtube video that lays the "Action News" theme song from my childhood on John Travolta's famous dance scene from "Saturday Night Fever."

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Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh alluded to CEPR's recent report on "The Changing Face of Labor," reading the headline from Tuesday's AP story on the report and then mocking the idea of women in unions.

The 32-second audio transcript is at Media Matters.

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To mark Veterans Day, a link to a webpage run by friends of Army First Lieutenant Dan Berschinski, a Peachtree City, Georgia, soldier who is convalescing at Walter Reed Army Medical Center after he lost both his legs in Afghanistan in August 2009.

The blog includes posts about Dan's treatment and recovery, links to his appearances on the front page of Stars & Stripes and the Washington Post, and photos with some of his famous visitors, including the Secretary of the Army, Senator Johnny Isakson from Georgia, and President Obama.

Wishing Dan and all veterans the very best today.

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Kris Warner and I have a new paper out today, "The Changing Face of Labor, 1983-2008" [pdf].

We reviewed the last 26 years of data from the Current Population Survey, starting with the earliest consistent data on unionization. Our main findings:

And here's one of the twenty or so graphs in the report. This one illustrates the large increase in the educational attainment of the union workforce. In 1983, union workers had about the same level of formal education as the overall workforce. Today union workers have more education than the overall workforce.

UPDATE 11/11/09: The New York Times and the Associated Press have run great stories on the report. And nice posts at BusinessWeek.com's "Money & Politics", The Plank at The New Republic, and Economix at the New York Times.

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Via Andrew Gelman's Applied Statistics blog, a fantastic flash graphic that gives you an idea of scale, from a coffee bean down to a carbon atom, using a slider on the bottom of the image.

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The Post-Autistic Economics Network, publishers of the real-world economics review, has started a new blog.

The bloggers at the new site: Frank Ackerman, Paul Davidson, Paul Omerod, Kevin Gallagher, Mark Weisbrot, Steve Keen, Dean Baker, and Edward Fulbrook.

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Dan Archer and Nikil Saval have written and illustrated a fantastic graphic history of the June 28 military coup against Honduran president Manuel Zelaya.

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University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) has made a name for himself outside the economics profession by emphasizing the role of incentives in everyday life.

The first chapter of Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics includes an extended example of how a new system of "high stakes testing" for grade-school students in the 1990s led about five percent of Chicago public school teachers to alter their students' answers to standardized tests in order to boost scores and earn performance-related raises and promotions.

But how does this kind of pretty run-of-the-mill insight about incentives translate into one of the best selling books of the decade and an industry of imitators inside and outside of academia?

The interesting question is not why a small share of Chicago public school teachers cheated when cheating could raise their pay. The really interesting question is why the vast majority of the teachers didn't cheat --especially when getting caught took a University of Chicago professor using a complicated computer algorithm that analyzed "700,000 sets of test answers, and nearly 100 million individual answers" (p. 28) and only produced "evidence ... strong enough to get rid of a dozen of them"? (p. 37)

Elinor Ostrom, who won the most recent Nobel Prize in Economics, spent a large chunk of her professional life looking at exactly the more interesting of these two questions. In particular, she wanted to know why there were so many exceptions to the "tragedy of the commons" --where individuals have an incentive to overuse jointly owned resources such as community grazing land or fishing grounds. Her research on a variety of commonly owned resources in a variety of different national settings showed that communities frequently develop a complex set of formal and informal institutions, from social norms to monitoring and governing structures, that blunt the economic incentives and avert the tragedy of the commons.

Early on in Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner pay lip-service to non-economic incentives, noting that "There are three basic flavors of incentives: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties." (p. 22) But, the whole book, the whole franchise, is about how economic incentives consistently trump social and moral incentives among sumo wrestlers, real-estate agents, drug dealers, and most of the rest of the human race.

Of course, Levitt and Dubner may well be on to something. Levitt has made millions from Freakonomics and is now one of the best known economists in the world. Ostrom, despite decades working on the research that led to her Nobel, was almost a complete unknown in the economics profession, not to mention among the general public.

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If you are like I am, and signed up for Twitter just to see what it was all about, and still can't figure it out, then the current issue of Wired has a piece that will help. The story gives a nice "history" of Twitter (I have older boxes of pasta in my kitchen), runs through the company's founders and key players, and describes its organizational philosophy (which has a lot in common with open source software development).

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University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan has a post today at the New York Times Economix blog where he seems to argue that the current push for statutory paid sick days in the United States is ignoring the role of economic incentives. According to Mulligan, workers in countries with generous paid sick day policies stay home because of "incentives, and not the flu".

I don't think Mulligan has been following the U.S. debate on paid sick days very closely. The U.S. debate is very serious about incentives. The current system --which does not require employers to provide paid sick days and leaves upwards of 50 million workers without paid sick days-- gives strong incentives to workers to go to work sick, lowering productivity and potentially spreading illness.

Of course, offering paid sick days also gives workers incentives to take time off when they are not sick. But, there is nothing in Mulligan's post that says where we should set the optimal level. He doesn't even make a case that the most generous systems in Europe are too generous, just that they lead to more sickness absences in some cases. For all we know, after we factor in the cost of contagious diseases, the most generous European systems might still be too stingy.

To make his point about the effect of incentives, Mulligan features the following graph from a recent IMF paper:

Mulligan, however, has made very selective use of the original IMF graph:

In the original, Denmark, Germany, and seven other countries with more generous statutory paid sick days policies all have lower sickness absence rates than the United States. A really interesting question is: how is it that these countries are able to provide both guaranteed paid sick days and lower sickness absence rates? (And why didn't Mulligan include these countries in his graph?)

UPDATE 11/10/09: Salon's Andrew Leonard ("How The World Works") wrote a nice piece linking to this post. So did Nick Baumann at Mother Jones. Casey Mulligan responds to the concerns raised here on his University of Chicago blog, but makes no mention of any of these issues at the New York Times' Economix blog, where his original post appeared.

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The plane I'm on right now has free WiFi, so I can't resist a quick post with a link to the Citigroup memo on the "Plutonomy", featured in Michael Moore's new movie "Capitalism: A Love Story".

The report, from October 2005, is remarkable for its open exuberance about high and rising inequality in the United States. At least it gets the facts right:

Citigroup even gets a key point that eludes most people, whose time horizon is heavily skewed toward the last 30 years:

And the text follows with a good discussion of how economic inequality was on the decline in the United States for most of the 20th century.

The Citigroup analysts, however, did get one thing spectacularly wrong. They argued that talk of economic stability and financial fragility misunderstood the dynamics of the new plutonomy.

Oops!

Last night, I finally saw Michael Moore's latest documentary "Capitalism: A Love Story", which is definitely his most mature and accessible film so far.

There was a lot to like about the movie, but I especially appreciated his retelling of American history since the Great Depression. One particularly nice segment focused on Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union Address, where FDR spelled out a "Second Bill of Rights":

Here's an audio excerpt from the speech:

And you can even buy a t-shirt with the "Second Bill of Rights" summarized on the front:

A friend emailed me a copy of this pdf document, prepared by Geoff Hodgson, which contains excerpts from a web page called Economics Job Market Rumors. The site, which looks to serve as a bulletin board for graduate students and untenured economics professors, recently ran a long thread with reactions to the latest Nobel prize in economics.

A large share of posters were critical of the committee's decision to award the prize to Oliver Williamson and, especially critical, as you can see in Hodgson's document or at the site itself, of the decision to give the prize to Elinor Ostrom.

Some of the criticisms are based on Ostrom's discipline (she is a political scientist, not an economist). Some are based on her relative obscurity within the economics profession (few on the list had ever even heard of her, fewer had actually read anything by her). But, an alarming share of the criticisms focus on Ostrom's gender.

The thread includes sensible comments from serious people, but the quantity and quality of sexist comments says terrible things about the future of academic economics.

After 14 months in Afghanistan, a soldier met at his front door by his two dogs.

Who says we miss them any less?

HT to BH.

I saw a great advertisement at a bus stop in DC today: the iconic photograph of a distressed George W. Bush looking down on Katrina from the window of Air Force One, with a hand-made sign immediately below declaring that "AIDS is DC's Katrina".

The bus shelter ads and related TV spots in the DC area are sponsored by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. According to the most recent data, the rate of HIV in DC is now over three percent, and possibly as high as five percent.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is calling on President Obama and the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to do more to fight the AIDS epidemic in DC and in the rest of the country. More details at changeAIDSobama.org.

If you're going to be in New York City on October 29, think about stopping by the Domestic Workers United (DWU) Donor Campaign Celebration. DWU is an organization of nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers in New York working for respect and fair labor standards for domestic workers. In less than a decade, the DWU has built a membership of over 2,300 workers and won almost a half a million dollars in unpaid wages for domestic workers.

DWU has recently launched a campaign to recruit "donor members" to help sustain their work through these tough economic times. The donor campaign celebration will be held on October 29 from 6:30pm to 9:30pm at the offices of SEIU Local 32BJ, 101 Avenue of the Americas, 22nd Floor. (A flyer with full details here.) You can use the pledge form if you'd like to help, but can't make it on the day.

I spent a few days last week in Portugal giving a couple of talks on economic inequality in the United States. The main event was a screening of the outstanding documentary film "Waging a Living," which looks at the lives of four low-wage workers in the United States in 2004. After the film, French economist and statistician Thomas Coutrot and I participated in a public discussion.

I also gave a talk at the Economics Faculty of the University of Coimbra on why economic inequality has been increasing so much in the United States since the end of the 1970s. The text of my talk is here.

Nathan Lane and I have a new CEPR report out today: "An International Comparison of Small Business Employment." We review the most recent available data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and find that, by every measure, the United States has the smallest or close-to-smallest small business sector in a sample of 22 of the world's rich, democratic countries.

The United States, for example, has the second lowest share of self-employed workers in the total work force:

And U.S. manufacturing has the third lowest share of enterprises with fewer than 20 employees. (The United States is at or near the bottom no matter where you make the cutoff --10, 20, up to 500 employees.)

One thing that the rest of the countries with bigger small-business sectors have in common is universal health care. People thinking about going into business on their own in the United States have to worry about where they and their employees will get health insurance. Potential entrepreneurs who are older, or have pre-existing conditions, or are women of child-bearing age face even bigger barriers. Small business owners in the rest of the rich world don't have to think twice about how they'll be getting their health insurance.

UPDATE 08/10/09: Paul Krugman had a nice blog post on our paper. And Dean Baker wrote an excellent column on it for the Huffington Post, which prompted over 350 comments.

UPDATE 08/12/09: Another blog post at the New York Times web site, this time by Catherine Rampell at the Economix blog. And another, at Mark Thoma's Economist's View. The comments at all four sites are worth a read. Lots of personal stories about how the U.S. health-care system blocked or ended a small business.

I have a short piece in BusinessWeek.com's "Debate Room" this week.

The resolution is: "There's reason to be optimistic about the U.S. economy."

I take the negative. James J. Angel, from Georgetown University, is on the affirmative.

The former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, Simon Johnson, has a great post on Baseline Scenario today, where he doles out some pretty strong criticism of Obama economic advisor Larry Summers.

Among other things, Johnson argues that it isn't likely that the financial sector will help to put us back on a solid long-term growth path --because the economy has already hit "Peak Finance". Going forward, the financial sector will account for a smaller, not a larger share of the total economy. He links to a very useful slide presentation that spells out the economic and political mess we're in.

And don't miss Johnson's "The Quiet Coup", in the May issue of The Atlantic.

I'm just back from a couple of weeks in Barcelona, where I taught a short course at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and then took some time off. During a visit to the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona there, I saw a great piece by Argentine conceptual artist León Ferrari called "Nosotros no sabíamos". The title references the refrain of socially and politcally respectable Argentines who are quick to say now that they just did not know about the torture, disappearances, and murders carried out by the military and others involved in the 1976 coup.

Ferrari's piece (available here in Flash format) simply mounts a wall full of clips from the Argentine press at the time of the coup. Taken together the headlines, photographs, and text provide a crushing refutation of this conveniently imagined ignorance. Pages and pages of headlines read: "Bodies Appear", "Body of ex-Radical Leader from Tucumán Found", "Three Bodies Riddled with Bullets Found in Trash Dump", "Body of child identified", "Three Writs of Habeus Corpus Filed", "Pope Expresses Concern Over Violence in Argentina", "Two Lawyers Kidnapped Thursday Turn Up Dead".

Of course, anyone who wanted to know, knew. The Argentine military chose the particular tactics documented in the clips --and permitted the press to run these accounts-- because these tactics spread fear, and people can't be afraid if they don't know what is going on.

The big first impression I had was that a conceptual artist here in the United States could easily do the same thing around the case for invading Iraq. The US media was overwhelmingly in favor of the invasion, but a dogged reader of even the Washington Post would have had enough information to be skeptical of the Bush-Cheney administration's claims about WMD.

But, then, it really hit me that the piece was much more directly applicable to the United States, a possible foretelling of where we might well be in 2020, say. "We Didn't Know" that the United States was torturing people. "We Didn't Know" that the United States was operating clandestine prisons around the world. Even though we did know all along about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, and Dick Cheney.

Finally someone has captured the real feel of the mean streets of Arlington.

And don't miss Tabbouleh Song or Hummus: The Rap either.

Hye Jin Rho, Shawn Fremstad, and I have a new CEPR paper comparing unemployment rates across the 21 major OECD economies.

According to the most recent data from the OECD, the United States is now tied with Portugal for the fourth highest harmonized unemployment rate in the top OECD countries.

And, according to the most recent data from Eurostat, in March the US unemployment rate was as high as the rate in the European Union's first 15 member countries (EU-15). March was the first time in the period for which Eurostat publishes data that the US unemployment rate was as high as the EU-15 rate.

Brad DeLong had a nice post on the piece. So did The Atlantic, but the comments section sure seemed to be unhappy with the report.

UPDATE 05/22/09: Today's New York Times online (and tomorrow's print edition) has a great story, by Floyd Norris, based on our paper. The accompanying graphic is excellent.

CEPR released a new report yesterday comparing paid-sick-day and paid-sick-leave policies in 22 rich countries, including the United States.

The report, written by Dr. Jody Heymann, CEPR's Hye Jin Rho, Alison Earle, and myself, finds that the United States is the only country in the sample of affluent countries that provides no short-term paid sick days or longer-term paid sick leave.

To make comparisons of complicated policies easier across the 22 countries, we looked at a typical worker in each of two situations: the first, where a worker must miss five days of work (the flu, for example); the second, where a worker must miss 50 days of work (say, while receiving cancer treatment).

The figure below summarizes the main results. In each case, the typical worker's entitlement is expressed as a share of their total five- or 50-day earnings that would be replaced by employers or by the national social insurance system. The United States is the only country that guarantees nothing in both cases. (As we document in the report, the voluntary employer-provided plans in the United States leave tens of millions of workers without paid sick days. And, don't forget, employers in other countries also often do better than what their national law requires.)

The report got a nice write up in Ezra Klein's new blog at the Washington Post and at the Huffington Post. The New York Times also mentioned the report in a good story by Steve Greenhouse on Saturday.

A few new papers out in the last several months. In March, "Is the U.S. Unemployment Rate Today Already as High as It Was in 1982?" (with Dean Baker) and, in April, "Unions and Upward Mobility for Service-Sector Workers."

Ben Zipperer and I have also updated our January 2007 "Dropping the Ax" report on illegal firings in union organizing elections.

My mother, Margaret A. Schmitt, Peggy to her friends, Peggy Anne to her family, died on April 25, of lung cancer. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a lovely obituary.

Yesterday, CEPR released a new report [pdf] I wrote on the positive effects of unions on the wages and health and pension benefits of women workers.

Women now make up 45 percent of all union workers, and if the trend of the last 25 years continues, women will be a majority of the unionized workforce by 2020. By CEPR's estimate, unionization raises the average woman's wages by about 11 percent, the probabilty that she has health insurance by 19 percentage points, and the probability of having a pension by 25 percentage points.

These benefits of unionization compare well even to the payoff from going to college. Joining a union, for example, has roughly the same effect on a woman's wages as attending a single year of college. And a union job actually has a bigger impact on a woman's likelihood of having health insurance or a pension than if she gets a four-year college degree.

The report has already received some nice attention: a great op-ed by Jill Esbenshade and Doreen Mattingly in the San Diego Union-Tribune; a nice post on feministing by Jessica Valenti; and posts at Feminist Majority, Ms. Magazine, pushback, Labor is Not a Commodity, and elsewhere.

UPDATE 12/04/08: Girl With Pen now has a post on the piece, including a short interview with me.

I've been following the debate around the proposed auto bailout and have ended up commenting a bit in the media. Today I appeared on "Tell Me More," the NPR program hosted by journalist Michel Martin.

You can listen to the whole segment (about 20 minutes) here. The other two guests on to talk about the auto bailout were Washington Post columnist Warren Brown and Detroit-based journalist Mary Chapman.

UPDATE 12/03/08: On November 18, I participated in an hour-long public affairs program on the auto and financial bailouts on PressTV.com (video here); and, on November 25, I appeared with Jonathan Tasini on the Angie Coiro Show in San Francisco to discuss the auto bailout (podcast here).

Today's Guardian has an editorial entitled "In Praise Of ... the Center for Economic and Policy Research." It is hard to imagine higher praise for my employer. Here is the editorial in its entirety:

One of the best things about the internet is its ability to hold people accountable for what they've said in the past. Back before the internet, people such as Ben Stein and Arthur Laffer could make predictions that were horribly wrong with little or no consequences to their reputations. The internets, particularly YouTube, though, has changed all that. The video below contrasts the almost criminally incorrect economic analysis of Stein, Laffer, and a host of other economic talking heads and business-news hosts, with the completely prescient views of Peter Schiff.

I find the consistently mean-spirited dismissiveness aimed at Schiff particularly appalling. The apologists openly laugh at Schiff as he's speaking and the hosts subtely and at least one time openly mock him --providing some of the most compelling examples I've seen of exactly how social forces work to resist rational, evidence-based attempts to denounce financial bubbles.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan, via JB.

Is there a greater American than Bruce Springsteen?

I doubt it.

If you're an economist, and you think the economy needs a two-to-three percent of GDP shot in the arm, you have until November 14 to sign the economists letter that CEPR is helping to circulate. Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Solow (both Nobel Prize winners) and Eileen Appelbaum are the lead signers.

My sister called this the "greatest moment ever on Channel 6" (the ABC affiliate in Philadelphia). Hang in there for the first 22 seconds, even if you're not a Phillies fan.

Over at Business Week's Debate Room, I'm arguing the Pro side of the resolution: "U.S. Economy: Years of Hardship Ahead."

The Con-man is Ethan S. Harris, author of Ben Bernanke's Fed: The Federal Reserve After Greenspan.

Krugman wins the Nobel prize in economics. I think Krugman himself got it exactly right when he said: "To be absolutely, totally honest I thought this day might come someday, but I was absolutely convinced it wasn't going to be this day."

The best thing about giving the prize to Krugman was that they didn't double up, pairing him, for example, with the very unpleasant right-wing trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati "for balance."

I'm posting from the patio of Caffè Strada in Berkeley. In a few hours, I'll be giving a talk on low-wage work in Europe at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employement.

The Onion reprints a colonial recipe for "Salt Cake," which I reprint for the benefit of my sisters.

Two Large Buckets Sea-Brine
Four Pounds Jew's Salt
One and One Half Pounds Butter (Salted)
One Blueberry

Any lacking Ingredients May be substituted with 
double Parts Coal Cinders, excepting the Blueberry, 
for which Two Pinches Salt are recommended if the 
Fruit cannot be obtained.

The October 2 edition of The Economist has results from their poll of economists' views on the two main presidential candidates' economic plans.

Apparently, economists don't read The Economist much because they seem to love Obama.

This gets it about right.

(Via Adbusters. Thanks, Kris!)

My CEPR colleague, Mark Weisbrot, went all David Letterman on the International Monetary Fund today with: "Top Ten Reasons Why the IMF Should not Lead the Reform in Global Finance."

More details, including a video link and a slide presentation here.

As a public service to my friends who are confused about the bailout, I reproduce here almost all of Dean Baker's posts on the bailout, in chronological order from September 19 through this morning.

September 19, 2008

10:39PM

"Questions on the Bush Bailout Package"

September 20, 2008

9:24AM

"The Budget and the Bailout"

12:43PM

"Progressive Conditions for a Bailout"

2:52PM

"Paulson Proposal: A Blank Check for Proven Incompetents"

September 21, 2008

9:22AM

"Paulson Missed the Bubble and Understated the Financial Crisis at Every Point"

11:26PM

"Senator Shelby Doesn't Understand the Bailout"

September 22, 2008

10:24PM

"Stocks Fall Because Congress May Not Give Banks Windfall"

September 23, 2008

5:34AM

"Extending the Bailout: It's Simple, Sell Us the Company and You're In"

September 24, 2008

5:38AM

"Leonhardt is Wrong, Limiting CEO Pay is Not a Sideshow to This Bailout"

11:05PM

"Paulson Says Bailout Is Not Urgent"

September 25, 2008

5:05AM

"No Bailout: Stop Rewarding Incompetence"

5:54AM

"MarketPlace Radio Misleads the Public on the Crisis"

8:25AM

"The Washington Post and Peter Peterson: Two More Reasons to Oppose This Bailout"

11:15PM

"NYT Gets It Wrong: Credit Has Not Frozen"

September 26, 2008

6:33AM

"The NYT Wants to Prop Up Pets.com Stock Price"

2:45PM

"Bailing on the Bailout, or Is It Too Big to Bail?"

September 27, 2008

12:51PM

"Bailout Conditions: Ending Welfare as We Know it Now"

10:21PM

"Wall Street's Infinite Sleaze: Goldman and AIG"

September 28, 2008

12:31PM

"Financial Meltdown: The Day After"

September 29, 2008

5:21AM

"NPR Misrepresents Bailout"

6:09AM

"Why Bail? The Banks Have a Gun Pointed at Their Head and Are Threatening to Pull the Trigger"

8:57PM

"The Bailout Round II: Adult Version? "

10:28PM

"NYT Promotes Hysteria on Bailout Bill"

September 30, 2008

6:18AM

"The Stock Market Is Not the Economy"

10:19PM

"When Wall Street Needs Money, Rules of Journalism No Longer Apply"

11:09PM

"How Do You Make a DC Intellectual Look Less Articulate Than Sarah Palin Being Interveiwed by Katie Couric?"

October 1, 2008

5:27AM

"Thomas Friedman: Another Example of Bailout Support Due to Unthinking Fear and Anger"

5:46AM

"Economics Lesson for Reporters: Other Things Equal, a High Stock Market is a Transfer of Wealth from People Who Don't Own Stock to People Who Do"

2:40PM

"The Credit Squeeze Scare"

October 2, 2008

5:58AM

"Responsibility and the Bailout: Will They Resign If It Fails?"

10:20AM

"The Plunge in Commercial Paper"

12:16PM

"Washington Post Gets Its Argument for the Bailout Wrong"

October 3, 2008

5:27AM

"NYT Reports On Paulson's Role in the Great Heist"

5:38AM

"Letting the Bank Robber Fix the Bank's Books"

6:25AM

"The Problem Is House Prices, NOT Interest Rates"

Seems to be some problem with embedding this particular clip. Just in case, here is the direct link.

I've got three new papers out this month. The first, with CEPR's Rebecca Ray and Janet Gornick of the Graduate Center at CUNY, is on "Parental Leave Policies in 21 Countries: Assessing Generosity and Gender Equality."

The second looks at "Unions and Upward Mobility for Latino Workers" and is also available in Spanish.

The most recent paper, released today, asks: "The Reagan Question: Are You Better Off Now Than You Were Eight Years Ago?" Short answer: 23 of 25 selected indicators of economic well-being and economic performance are worse in 2008 than they were in 2000. The CEPR page where you can download the report also includes a section for comments. Let me know if you think I missed anything or got anything wrong.

Today is World Day Against Software Patents. Here is the press release from the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure.