(Edit: Please note that there is a footnote to this story)
I normally don’t comment on articles about me, since I am aware that now that my views are part of the public debate, I have to take the good with the bad in coverage. I wouldn’t have written this either, were it not for the line “If only his predictions were so reliable” in Jessica Irvine’s piece in today’s SMH “Walking on a wire stretched between stimulus and debt”.
The Dynamite Prize for Economics–to be awarded to the three economists most responsible for the Global Financial Crisis–is going gangbusters with over 14,000 votes so far.
It may pick up even more thanks to some excellent work by Business Insider/Clusterstock, which has produced a brilliant graphic illustrating the prize.
It’s magnificent, and here it is below for your enjoyment–click on the “Go To The Short List of Nominees for the Dynamite Prize in Economics–>” link and that will take you to the graphic, or click here to go straight to the graphic.
As most Australian readers would know, I recently lost half of a bet over Australian house prices when the Government’s “First Home Owners Boost”–which I prefer to call the First Home Vendors Boost–reignited Australia’s house price bubble.
As a result, I’m walking from Australia’s Parliament House to Australia’s highest mountain, Mt Kosciousko–a distance of 224km (140 miles). The walk will start at 2pm on Thursday April 15 from the entrance to Parliament House and–my legs willing–finish 8 days later on the summit of Mt Kosciousko (which is 2228 metres–or about 7000 feet–above sea level).
Peter Switzer interviewed me on his cable TV show for Sky News last week.
You can watch the interview here. I would also recommend watching the interview with John Hewson (for international viewers, John Hewson was a previous leader of the Liberal Party of Australia, which despite its name is Australia’s conservative political party), in which amongst other things he noted that Central Bank independence, for which he had campaigned while a politician, had not worked out as he had hoped, and had instead left unaccountable economists in charge of monetary policy.
Voting is now open for what has been renamed the Dynamite Prize in Economics.
The renaming was necessary because the owners of the Ig Nobel Prize objected to the similarity–which is understandable. They also suggested the Dynamite Prize as a useful alternative.
We are, after all, intending to award the prize to the three economists who did most to drop the GFC bomb on the global economy, via their naive and utterly unrealistic theories of economics.
The selection process produced the following set of nominees:
I am giving a talk on the blog today at Swinburne University in Melbourne, and frankly I am not all that prepared on the main issue of interest to the organisers there, which is the educational impact of this blog (and blogging in general) versus other forms of education.
I just established this blog to get the Debtwatch report out initially, and it’s grown in both size and personality in ways that I never envisaged. It’s been very gratifying, but I haven’t really had the time to reflect on they whys and hows of the process of blogging.
I’m giving two talks at Swinburne University of Technology on Thursday February 4th. The information below is reproduced from the flyer for the event developed by regular blog contributor Matt Mitchell, who has arranged the talks:
I forgot to post my presentation file in the first version of this post. I’ve since edited it, but I know that a lot of people using RSS feeds would not notice the change. So here is the presentation that I gave at that talk to UNEP in November:
A PDF version
The United Nations Environment Program did a very unusual and far-sighted thing last year: it asked the CSIRO to produce a version of its biophysical model of the Australian economy for developing countries, and to pair that with an economic model which had to be non-equilibrium in nature.
The Stocks and Flows Resource Modelling team at CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, which maintains this biophysical model, approached me in July to see whether I would be willing to attempt the development of that nonequilibrium multisectoral economic model.
The US Senate should not reappoint Ben Bernanke. As Obama’s reaction to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat showed, real change in policy only occurs after political scalps have been taken. An economic scalp of this scale might finally shake America from the unsustainable path that reckless and feckless Federal Reserve behavior set it on over 20 years ago.
Some may think this would be an unfair outcome for Bernanke. It is not. There are solid economic reasons why Bernanke should pay the ultimate political price.
