Christina Romer Resigns in 2nd Exit for Obama Economy Team 6
On 6 August 2010, Bloomberg reports Romer Resigns in 2nd Exit for Obama Economy Team. Similar report from the Washington Post.
-RichardH
Daily Archives: August 6, 2010
GOP Wrecks Economy To Win Votes
The article by Stephen Crockett is actually headlined GOP Eyes Big Gains Over the Economy.
The article is another restatement of the economics that makes the Republican plan so bad for the country. The more different ways this can be explained, the more the chance that enough people will finally get it. If enough people finally understand what the Republicans are doing, then the predicted Democratic losses in November will not happen.
Some of the paragraphs of wisdom include:
Jobs are not created by just having large pools of investment money available. There must be the opportunity to invest in a business that will have customers who can buy the goods and services before the investment money flows into job creation activities.
And this:
Tax cuts for the wealthy create huge investment money pools but not jobs. The United States has plenty of money sitting idle in corporate and personal coffers. Corporations have almost a trillion dollars sitting essentially idle in corporate accounts at this time.
And this:
The former middle class disposable income now controlled by the economic elite funds speculation and unsound “bubbles” in the economy instead of a healthy economy because sound businesses now lack paying customers.
Deregulation helps corporations charge excessive prices. Not enforcing anti-monopoly laws permits price gouging. Not capping interest rates concentrates wealth and reduces consumer spending.
And more. Read the whole article.
Error Message—Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Being Wrong
In her 3 August 2010 post on Slate, Kathryn Schulz interviews Google Research Director Peter Norvig. Error Message.
There’s a story going back to the founding of Google: One of the venture capitalists came to [company founders] Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] and said “OK, the first thing you have to decide is, is this company going to be run by sales or by marketing? They said, “We think we’ll take engineering.” He laughed and said, “Oh, you naive college kids, that’s not the way the real world works.” And they said, “Well, we want to try it.” Ten years later, that experiment is still running; engineering is still the center of the company. And it seems like it’s worked.
And, like you say, it does create a very different attitude toward error. If you’re a politician, admitting you’re wrong is a weakness, but if you’re an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you’re always right, then you aren’t getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be.
Read on.
-RichardH