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Name ten more.

1. Paul Krugman
2. Greg Mankiw
3. David Beckworth
4. Brad DeLong
5. Mark Thoma
6. Bruce Bartlett

Sorry for only finding six; these are mostly economists with more prominent blogs. I'm sure someone who studies economics could find many more.

Note that there is a little debate here about the very top of the Reagan tax cuts, but I would consider that to be "some time ago".

according to an article (referenced below, very entertaining article which I suggest you read when you have the time), laying undersea cable a bit safer than overland, because "anyone with a bulldozer" can be a fool and do damage to your line.

see here (again, one of the best articles I've ever read):
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
or here
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/OpEd/virtual/stephenson.html

according to an article (referenced below, very entertaining article which I suggest you read when you have the time), laying undersea cable a bit safer than overland, because "anyone with a bulldozer" can be a fool and do damage to your line.

see here (again, one of the best articles I've ever read):
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
or here
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/OpEd/virtual/stephenson.html

That's a lot of bucks, but studies like these are easy to take in isolation instead of looking at the big picture.

The U.S. economy is what? About 12 Trillion dollars a year? In 1999 the internet economy was closing in on 150 Billion, by now it has to be through the roof.

Poor software? It costs over 200 Billion a year (sorry no link). You have to put these numbers in perspective. When you are dealing with 300 million folks or so, and the world's largest free market, any kind of estimate for anything is going to be big. The common cold costs over $30 Billion a year.

Just keep it all in perspective. The internet economy will blow right through this obstacle if it gets in the way of sales

I'm not as enthusiastic about _Wired_, though.

There have been some diamonds in that sea of coal. As you mention later on, the article "Mother Earth Motherboard" was possibly the greatest technical/historical article ever written. Here's Wired's copy. Here's another. And another.

In 1996, Stephenson wrote a (long) article for Wired about FLAG. Most of his observations are also valid for the cable discussed here.

Try Brad Delong. Similar point of view, similar credentials, lower price point.

You mispelled "reality" at the end there.

Ever notice how few right-wing blogs have open comments compared to the lefty blogs?

Very regularly. Try going over to http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/ and entering something which departs from the party. Then count to ten...

Economists still tend to be, ahh, skeptical of his "gold bug" tendencies. In fact, we'd call anyone else who said the same things a crackpot.

Are you sure he's much of a "gold bug" though? Unabashed gold bugs (like Austrian economist Mark Skousen) would suggest just the opposite. (which is just as well, IMO, as I'm no gold bug either... but then, WTF do I know, I'm just an Econ. minor, heh (though I often wonder if I should've made it my major when I started university, rather than CS)...)

IMO, Friedman really has 2 personalities when it comes to political economy (i.e., his normative economics) - his idealist side, and his practical side.

His ideals are pretty clearly more libertarian than classical liberal; he once said in an interview in Reason magazine that he'd "like to be a zero-government libertarian" (like his son, David), but when asked why he wasn't one, he noted that it's not feasible.

But in practice -- when he's suggested alternate ways to fund public education (via a public/private choice using vouchers, even though his ideal is to completely privatize education), when he's suggested that the Fed be run a particular way (even though his ideal is to dismantle it), when he's suggested (as in (IIRC) chapter 9 of Capitalism and Freedom) that we do actually need some sort of social safety net (for which he proposed his negative income tax) -- some of the less-sane, more-extreme libertarians, e.g. Rothbard, criticized him as being a "statist". But really, his practical suggestions (which he sees as leading in the direction of his ideals) are more classical liberal than libertarian in nature. Hence the sometimes-confusing dichotomy...

Unlike in Friedman's ideal, I don't see the Fed as a terrible institution, despite some of its mistakes, such as their failure to elect a replacement chairman in the late 1920s after Benjamin Strong died (as my Monetary Policy prof. once described to us and to which Friedman partly attributes the exacerbation of the Depression). The ability to control inflation by controlling the money supply is awfully valuable, when it works (though given housing prices lately, I wonder what the *actual* total inflation rate is, rather than the more-often reported CPI of (currently) about 3%).

But then, given that I've lived only a few years longer than through the Greenspan era and given that he seems to be described variously as either "lucky" or "skilled" (skill which doesn't necessarily follow in other Fed chairmen), my view is probably colored by their relatively very good performance of the last 20 years. I didn't live through the Fed's failure before and during the Great Depression, nor did I even live through the stagflation of the 70's...

I could really use some seed comments at the website :)

I'll see what I can do, when I get the chance... :)

Given my fairly-limited sphere of influence though (of all my friends I talk to regularly, only 3 are politically and economically-interested: 2 are libertarians and 1 is a borderline socialist (nevermind the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc.)), might I also suggest making your blog's presence known on a few other econ. and/or law-related blogs:

* EconLog -- Arnold Kling (MIT PhD) writes there and regularly gets a fair number of comments

* The Becker-Posner blog -- the Gary Becker and judge Posner blog...

* Bradford DeLong's blog -- not a classical liberal or libertarian. But a lot of people seem to read his so-called "reality-based" blog, so in the name of garnering traffic to yours, it might be

"A stitch in time to save nine." comes from that event

The old saying "a stitch in time saves nine" is much older than 1937. I think you are confusing "a switch in time to save nine". This version of the old saying was a humourous play on words at the time of the Supreme Court decisions. Those decisions upheld parts of the New Deal and ended FDR's plan to increase the number of justices to 15 from 9.

The phrase is mentioned inter alia here and here.

Exactly what taxes are the US going to cut?

Ah, my bad, confusing conjuction that should read thats what RAISING taxes and CUTTING spending is for.

It matters because you can't run an economy the size of the US on the backs of 1% of the population!

The country was founded on the backs of the wealthiest. Who do you think Hamiltonian favored?

Furthermore, here's a nice little write-up on the trade deficit and why it isn't as horrible a thing as you might believe. Of course, it may just be too naive, but you get the point.

I really enjoyed the commentary at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005 -3_archives/000024.html#more
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate. All these things will be lost in time -- like the root partition last week. Time to die..." -- Peter Gutmann

The republican party / administration is in a terrible state right now. Many former supporters are jumping ship due to the neocon takeover and the sheer incompetency of the bush administration. Add to this that recently two high level RNC members are guilty of voter registration fraud and we're looking at a party that deserves to be mocked because 1.) they're fucking up the country, and 2.) They're making such bad decisions.

Call me a partisan, but sometimes one group is severely wrong.

Let's count some conservatives who have jumped ship over the current administration shall we?

1.) The Economist Magazine
2.) The Cato Institute
3.) Former Bush 41 national security adviser and family friend Brent Scowcroft
4.) Andrew Sullivan

Now let's add groups that have condemned this administration

1.) 698 Security Scholars
2.) Economists Against Bush Tax Plan several Nobel laureates among them
3.) Business School Professors (including many at Bush's Alma Matter)

The conservative party has shown itself to be anything BUT conservative. Ask uber conservative pat buchanan who will tell you the party was hijacked by the neocons who didn't really have much favor until the current administration. Reagan and Bush I didn't really like them even.

I think that you're mistaking conservatism for the republican party, which has become incompetent and simply not conservative on anything but social issues. But even there, the current admin is so inept they can't formulate functioning policy (see the pork that is "Faith Based Initiatives").

And dont' talk about Zell Miller, a man famous for switching sides, and who, quite frankly, is an idiot.

Remember the job of the media is to report what is ACTUALLY HAPPENING, not "RNC says DNC says". The Daily Show is the only thing on the air right now actually doing this.

I went to a speech last night about Peak Oil saying that oil production was going to start falling at 10% a year every year starting in two to three years because of a well known oil geology phenomenon known as Hubbert's Peak. So which is going to be the end of humanity? Global Warming or Peak Oil?

Corporate profits are at an all time high. See this chart. From the link:

But with the end of the recession in late 2001,* corporate profits jumped enormously. And they have continued to rise as the lousy labor market has dragged down wages and salaries while greatly-increased productivity has driven value added per worker way, way up.

Atrios/Eschaton
Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo
Billmon's Whiskey Bar
Matthew Yglesias
Eric Alterman
Kevin Drum
Brad DeLong
Daily Kos
Digby
Mark Kleiman
Hesiod's Counterspin
Bob Somerby's incomparable Daily Howler

and the inimitable Bartcop
(and Fafblog)

Polling: Daily Kos Wonderful poll analysis, great community, lots of smart commenters

Economics: Brad DeLong He's a PhD economist and a former economic advisor to the Clinton administration

Social Policy: Body and Soul She blogs the uncomfortable places where others won't go.

Politics: Atrios The man reads everything. This site is especially good for U.S. politics.

Snark: Sisyphus Shrugged This woman has it. Her recent posts on Nader are vicious and painfully accurate.

Satire: Fafblog!!! The world's only source of Fafblog. Do not drink while reading. Your keyboard will thank you.

The key is to get blogs that have a niche. You have to know what kind of information you are trying to get from them.

The aforementioned TMP is great for foreign policy and includes a fair amount of original reporting.

Brad DeLong, a Cal economist, has an excellent blog focusing on econimic issues.

The Gadflyer is a collaborative effort looking mainly at the politcal landscape and campagin maneuvering.

And, finally, for a more literary dessert than Wonkette, try Travis LaFrance He's hillariously aloof and searingly witty.

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/

Certainly not if there if there is a substantial risk of fuel cost rises for current preferred energy generation methods in a timeframe less than or on the close order of the lead time for putting a currently-nonexistant wind plant on the grid (both for construction and dealing with NIMBY locational issues that may arise).

Large supply shocks are MINDBOGGLINGLY bad for the economy especially for something as fundamental these days as the cost of electricity, and are far worse for consumers than for corporations or corporate stockholders-- especially for the corporations producing the shocked supply. You don't remember the economy of the early 1970's very well, do you? It royally sucked. "Those who do not study their history...."

It takes time to develop the engineering expertise to make wind plants economical, efficient, and integrated into a fairly regular cyclical demand grid (nontrivial given the intermittency of wind supply). Subsidies make it look at least marginally economical to build plants now. Once you have people building plants, greed will drive them to try to figure out how to improve them to make more money... which will start pushing the calendar on developing the aforementioned expertise, so that we will (hopefully) have it before the need for it is critical. Yeah, it's a "carrot for the jackass" approach, but given the number of stupid jackasses in the US, and given the traditions of this country, we really can't use a stick exclusively.

Not bloody likely for WWII, check out this munitions ouput chart. The US dwarfs everyone else, and in fact outproduces everyone else combined during the last three years of the war! I can't find concrete numbers for WWI, but the US certainly outproduced the rest of the allies during the last two years of the war. It is precisely because of the US industrial machine that Germany developed the U-boats, they figured that could choak off the flow of material support from the US and thus insure that they were fighting only a single industrial power (Russia).

He basically wrote all these economic books and once he was hired by the Bush administration, he contradicts his writings.

For an economically-informed discussion of outsouring, see this article by Daniel Drezner.

No, Sy Hersh himself in interviews.

Those things you do compare with mass graves being filled with bodies of the residends of places like Falluja killed by the marines and children being tortured in front of their mothers in Abu Ghraib.

You are clearly a victim of a brainwashing of you believe that Iraq war was an improvement for the iraqis over their previous situation. Saddam was a brutal tyrant in need of removal, but ends do not justify the means. Or actually they do if you are a muslim fundamentalist or a born-again christian nutjob.

WTF? DO NOT USE EITHER OF THOSE SITES AS INDICATING ANYTHING ABOUT EITHER PARTY. They're both a bunch of jackass extremists. For left/democrat stuff try atrios or Daily KOS or if you're in to economics Brad DeLong. For righties/repub you can check out Instapundit or the Volokh Conspiracy and I'm sure there are more sane rightish folks out there as well (although Instapundit is on the edges of what I call sane but I'm generally a lefty). As with all Blogs they're all worth checking out but take everything you see with a big grain of salt and get involved in the comments.

we are soon enough lost in a forest of our own verbal undoings.

And by the way, here is what another great writer said on the seeming absurdity of willing economic determinism without acceptable frames of reference:

If there existed the universal mind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace -- a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and of society -- such a mind could, of course, a priori draw up a falutless and exhaustive ecoonomic plan. The plan is checked and in considerable measure realized through the market. Economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations.

An ac wrote I know an awful lot of athiests and agnostics who are opposed to unrestricted abortion in America.

The abolition of slavery was considered the work of religious radicals too, who had this wild notion that all those slaves were human beings and their book said it was wrong to keep human beings in bondage, but not every abolitionist was religious. The right to live, like the right to not be a slave, is something that plenty of people can grasp without the guidance of Holy texts.

So, at the end of the day, like most things, the problem can be blamed directly on religious people. In this case, American Christians.

At the end of the day, I find that most problems can be blamed on the intollerent. You know, like some American Christians... also, exactly like you.

Good points.

The thing thing with political debates that you have to remember is that there are real consequences for the ideas that we kick around like so many political footballs.

Slavery in england was ended relatively peacefully. That is good.

Slavery in america (same idea, different people kicking it in a different direction) was ended with a civil war. (ok so that's the kindergarten version) Which is also good, except for the people who got killed.

The thing is that if you're male, you will never have to have an abortion. I'm male and so I can easly say "Abortion this, Abortion that. I could have been one of those foetuses." But on the other hand I'll never be a single teenaged mother. Which is different from being a single teenaged father because my body will never attempt to turn itself inside out to deliver a baby and then make me want to lactate thus making it harder for me to run away.

With the right to privacy, personal consequences become a lot more subtle - David Brin said in the "Transparent Society" that the consequence of the eventual death of privacy due to the power of electronic media would simply be a return to the village, where everybody knows everybody elses business.

I think that's another play of political football because of what happens if the village you return to is This village, where knowing is not enough. If people do something terrible, and everybody knows it but nobody acts it is in some ways worse than if they had their privacy to begin with.

Also you have to consider that majorities are fickle. What if 20 years from now an activity that you consider perfectly acceptable like say, knowing how to program becomes unacceptable by the general community.

Want an example? Think about it: If you can program in C, you can write viruses! that's scary for the non-programmers out there that think that software magically appears shrinkwrapped at the store.

It starts when you first have to register all your compilers. Then you have a crackdown against free unregistered compilers and "Kitchen table linux dealers". 60 minutes runs a special about how computer shows allow unknown people to aquire software - including unregistered compilers (a compiler being an incredibily powerful piece of software that allows you to create any other piece of software... Including VIRUSES).

Mandataory "Compiler licences" are required by the government where the person applying for one has to submit three photos, a blood sample, a retinal image and fingerprints. At least two of these are checked by biometric scanning every time the compiler is invoked (following the tradition of "smart guns" or "safe firearms").

The compiler must be stored on an EPROM in a dedicated piece of hardware and the source brought to it on some kind of storage media. The output is removed on another storage media to prevent people hacking in and compiling software from their terminals. The compiler's hardware must be kept in a safe that weighs at least 150kg or is b

And there is plenty of reason to feel that they are not true. For example, take a look at what Brad DeLong, a Berkeley economics professor and well-known blogger, says about the recent government forecast of over 2 million new jobs to be created this year.

here

Both of your maps are still misleading because they prey on the human tendancy to say "more area" means "more overall".

Check out this map indexed by population

Well, I guess it must be the eleventh planet then, for we already found a tenth. Wasn't it called Quauar? Or was it the other way round? I mean Niburu being the eleventh.
Come to think about it, that blob out there was probably called Quaoar
Never mind, err.. WHOOSH..WHOOSH.. Is this thing on?

That's what they taught us in econ 101/102, using a text by Lester Thurow, and called it the circular flow economy, and basically said the same thing, that manufacturing has to pay the factors of production (labor) enough to BUY BACK the stuff produced.

dan kohn wrote a nice essay ("steal this essay 1") about why when the marginal cost to produce something is zero, the property regime must be rethought. bradford delong, a berkeley economist (and occasional wired contributor :) in conjunction with froomkin wrote a more detailed piece here. oh and delong also presented with lawrence summers (former treasury secretary, now president of harvard) this stuff at the 2001 annual federal reserve symposium in jackson hole, including an interesting proposal:

"New institutions and new kinds of institutions--perhaps even some that have been tried before, like the French government's purchase and placing in the public domain of the first photographic patents in the early nineteenth century (see Kremer (1998))--may well be necessary to achieve the fourfold objectives of (a) price equal to marginal cost, (b) entrepreneurial energy, (c) accelerating the cumulative process of research, and (d) providing appropriate financial incentives for research and development. The work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer (1998, 2000), both with respect to the possibility of public purchase of patents at auction and of shifting some public research and development funding from effort-oriented to result-oriented processes (that is, holding contests for private companies to develop vaccines instead of funding research directly), is especially intriguing in its attempts to develop institutions that have all the advantages of market competition, natural monopoly, and public provision."

dan kohn wrote a nice essay ("steal this essay 1") about why when the marginal cost to produce something is zero, the property regime must be rethought. bradford delong, a berkeley economist (and occasional wired contributor :) in conjunction with froomkin wrote a more detailed piece here. oh and delong also presented with lawrence summers (former treasury secretary, now president of harvard) this stuff at the 2001 annual federal reserve symposium in jackson hole, including an interesting proposal:

"New institutions and new kinds of institutions--perhaps even some that have been tried before, like the French government's purchase and placing in the public domain of the first photographic patents in the early nineteenth century (see Kremer (1998))--may well be necessary to achieve the fourfold objectives of (a) price equal to marginal cost, (b) entrepreneurial energy, (c) accelerating the cumulative process of research, and (d) providing appropriate financial incentives for research and development. The work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer (1998, 2000), both with respect to the possibility of public purchase of patents at auction and of shifting some public research and development funding from effort-oriented to result-oriented processes (that is, holding contests for private companies to develop vaccines instead of funding research directly), is especially intriguing in its attempts to develop institutions that have all the advantages of market competition, natural monopoly, and public provision."

Google is known best for its search capabilities, but the Pyra buyout isn't the company's first foray into creating or buying Internet content. Two years ago, Google bought Deja. com, a company that had collected and continued to update Usenet newsgroups, Internet discussion forums. More recently, it created Google News, a site that gauges the collective thoughts of more than 4,000 news sites on the Net. But now, Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company's director of corporate communications, called "a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation." and yadda yadda yadda. All that may be true but I don't believe it. This is not about "content" and Google isn't interested in "content", the news service is the result of the reliability that Google brings to other people's resource and content and the Blogger deal is the next stage in the development of Googling the net. PageRank generates reliable sources of whatever kind of information you ask for, based on search terms generated by idiots like me. Bloggers have developed a whole new set of tools that is making the reliability of information much higher and is using massively distributed human resources to find and rank that information very quickly. A story hits the net and the Blogosphere, using newsreaders, Blogs with Trackback links and the usual power rule processes of the network evaluates that information and weaves it into it proper place in the knowledge universe very quickly. By making Blogs the preferred system for publishing information in the first place, Google will be able to help improve the weaving and ranking processes even more reliably and in the otherwise untrustworthy world of the Internet, that will keep them on top. While other search engines are still trying to figure out how to turn their spidered information into a business, Google is focusing on what really matters, and that is reliability. The Blogosphere will benefit because Google will fund the development of the tools and they will be open source because the more of them they have out there the more valuable they are, because Google does not sell search, it sells reliability, and every blogger and surfer and webmaster in the world is contributing to that. We do not get free services from Google, we pay for them with our clicks on their linked information. Pretty soon we will also be paying with our Blogging and we will be paid back with reliable information. That's an information economy; the information is the currency, knowledge is the payoff and reliability is marketable to those whose reliance on it is highest. I've said for a long time that Google is not a search engine. Now we have Larry Page's word for it.

Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank. "Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

Here's another bit that makes so much more sense than most people get.

Information wants to be free? Copying doesn't cost anything. Distributing another copy costs basically zero. Google surveys the free part of the web.

Google surveys the free part of the web. Everyone wants to be on Google, because if you aren't in Google you don't exist. So you had better be free, and good, and referenced, and linked to the universe, or you don't exist and if you don't exist you sure as hell don't do business. Can we call that part of the debate settled please?

Cryptic messages began to scroll up the screen. If you had booted a commercial OS, you would, at this point, be seeing a "Welcome to MacOS" cartoon, or a screen filled with clouds in a blue sky, and a Windows logo. But under Linux you get a long telegram printed in stark white letters on a black screen. There is no "welcome!" message. Most of the telegram has the semi-inscrutable menace of graffiti tags.