MTEF is The Bayesian Heresy: Talks

Showing posts with label Talks. Show all posts

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Hidden Wealth of Nations

The Hidden Wealth of Nations by David Halpern
Table of Contents
Preface and Introduction.
Chapter One: Prosperity and wellbeing.
Chapter Two: Not getting along.
Chapter Three: The politics of virtue.
Chapter Four: Fairness and Inclusion.
Chapter Five: Power and Governance.
Chapter Six: Conclusion.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

On the Origins of the Financial Crisis - one more time

Thursday, February 26, 2009

PPPs- Back to Basics

Public-Private Partnerships: In Pursuit of Risk Sharing and Value for Money

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Podcast of the Day

Acemoglu on the Financial Crisis

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Economic Gangsters

Friday, December 19, 2008

Maya MacGuineas, Director of the Fiscal Policy Program at New America and President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, argued that the economic crisis is revealing the deep cracks in our existing social insurance system. Although the focus right now is on stimulus and economic growth, we must start talking about our institutions and how to update them. The federal budget deficit will reach at least $1 trillion next year, MacGuineas said, and policymakers need to review the budget line-by-line and think hard about how we are going to pay for it all. Because most of our money currently goes towards “mandatory spending programs,” these programs cannot be ignored when we rethink the budget. MacGuineas would like to link stimulus and long-term entitlement reform. The sums of current stimulus proposals are so large as to enable major, lasting investments in our economy. We should borrow money now, MacGuineas argued, but offset costs once the economy is stabilized. Without neglecting the importance of greater individual responsibility, we must think about vulnerable populations in our country right now--children and those hurt by globalization. Government must become more progressive, and focus its limited resources on those that need them most. The current economic climate demands major reforms, MacGuineas concluded, and the national discussion about the most appropriate policy choices is just beginning.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason

Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason by Russell Shorto

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN SELDOM MAKE HISTORY
By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

NYT's review;

Ulrich, a Harvard historian whose “Midwife’s Tale” won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for history, uses “three classic works in Western feminism” as a springboard for examining the theme of “bad” behavior. Could the popularity of her slogan, she wondered, be explained by “feminism, postfeminism or something much older?” The answer emerges in Ulrich’s choice of texts: Christine de Pizan’s “Book of the City of Ladies,” written in 1405; Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Eighty Years and More,” published in 1898; and “A Room of One’s Own,” based on two lectures Virginia Woolf gave in 1928 — all works by women who “turned to history as a way of making sense of their own lives.” History, Ulrich reminds us, “isn’t just what happens in the past,” but what we choose to remember. As much invention as discovery, history attempts to make the chaotic present into a coherent picture by comparing it to images, equally artificial, fashioned from events long past.

Pizan, Stanton, Woolf: three women with “intellectual fathers” and “domestic mothers,” who were “raised in settings that simultaneously encouraged and thwarted their love of learning” and “married men who supported their intellectual ambitions.” For each, her “moment of illumination came through an encounter with an odious book” expressing man’s “disdain” for women. Pizan responded to a 15th- century satire containing “diatribes” against her sex, Stanton to law tomes that set forth the rights of husbands and fathers over their wives and daughters, Woolf to “The Mental, Moral and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex,” an imagined history representing what she discovered in the reading room of the British Museum.

Ulrich’s new book is a work of selection and synthesis; she finds common archetypes in far-flung sources, making connections that are sometimes distant but never tenuous. The “Amazons” chapter is illustrated by examples from archaeological digs in Kazakhstan, South American folk tales and her own cultural backyard, which yields “an Olympic athlete, a female soldier, a lesbian separatist, a comic-book heroine.” Her associative logic reveals how A prefigures Q or even Z rather than ordering A before B before C, and brings a female sensibility to what is more typically the linear, cause-and-effect formula of history, a majority of which, Ulrich points out, is written by men.