Tuesday, January 27, 2009

(Many) Econlinks

  • Brief but pertinent thoughts of Ricardo Caballero on the (real) causes and solutions to the current financial crisis.

  • Bill Easterly (and colleagues) have just started a very promising blog, Aid Watch. And talking about Development Economics, check out a very flattering portrait of one of its (if not the) young stars.

  • Dan Hamermesh ask the $64000 question: who changes the kissing rules? NB: having lived for quite a while in The Netherlands (and there again for two months, in a week!), I count myself one of the non-Dutch experts in three-cheek kissing :-).

  • Not sure I immediately agree with Alex Tabarrok; some people believe the Nobel in Economics should be given only every 4 years... The John Bates Clark medal was fine somewhere in between, every two years. Will the Yrjö Jahnsson- EEA award also change to annual rather than biennial frequency?...

  • I've only found out about this recently, via Tyler Cowen on MR. It should answer many of Jim Heckman's detractors. Obviously, as a student of Jim Heckman in that Oxford summer course of 2005 that he mentions (organized by David Hendry and Bent Nielsen, at Nuffield College), I could be biased (inter alia, that course was one of the best short courses I ever took; moreover, I guess I also publicly declared that I am a Heckman fan-- in Romanian). But in any case I think the material Heckman posted on his site for everybody's perusal ought to be clarifying enough, for everybody...

  • Ranking The Beatles' songs (again via the cool guys at MR, who else?). This looks (at least goal-wise) a similar endeavour to the project (also very controversial... and heavily criticized...) of David Galenson, mentioned a while ago on this blog. Would just add that I definitely agree with number 1 being Number 1 in this Beatles song top, ie. the beyond-brilliant "A Day in the Life", but I would also clearly place "Strawberry Fields Forever" second... and I would further interchange quite a few positions in top 30... and quite a lot of positions further down... So much for the "consensus of taste" :-).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

So what would be your own top 10 then, Professor Buhai? :) Kh, MM.

Sebi Buhai said...

Not an easy one, M&M... Well, since I did give the impression I know something about Beatles, here's what I would dare to propose as Beatles top 10, right now : "A Day in the Life", "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Golden Slumbers", "Something", "Eleanor Rigby", "The Fool on the Hill", "For No One", "Hey Jude", "All You Need Is Love", and for number 10 I can't decide right now between "Nowhere Man","You've got to hide your love away", "I am the Walrus", "Taxman" , "Ticket to Ride", "Two of Us", "Yesterday", "She's Leaving Home", "Across the Universe" and "A Hard's Day Night".

Satisfied? :-)

Anonymous said...

wow, a whole top 20 :) I am for Hey jude first! And where is Penny lane?! M&M :)

Sebi Buhai said...

This is a top 10, not a top 20, please pay attention :-).

And yes, I would also like many other things...