Monday Music: Isn't This a Lovely Day

"Isn't This a Lovely Day," by Irving Berlin was written for the movie Top Hat (1935), starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The song has been recorded by many of the jazz greats, including the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald.






-

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Econ theory as signaling?

Image
I don't expend much effort dissing macroeconomics these days, but every once in a while it's good to give people a reminder. I wrote a Bloomberg post about how academic macro (or more accurately, mainstream macro theory) has not really helped out the finance industry, the Fed, or coffee house discussions. The reason, as Justin Wolfers recently pointed out , is basically that DSGE models don't work. Brad DeLong then wrote a post riffing on mine , which is excellent and which you should read. A super-fun Twitter discussion then followed, part of which Brad storified for posterity . But that leaves the question: Assuming Wolfers and DeLong and I aren't just blowing smoke out of our rear ends, and DSGE models really don't work, why do so many macroeconomists spend so much time on them? One obvious hypothesis is that a huge percent of their human capital is already invested in knowing how to do this technique, so they just keep doing what they know how to do, and teachi...
Read more

Robert Lucas in biology class

Image
Back in August, a bunch of people were talking about Paul Romer and Bob Lucas and history of macro and stuff like that. Somehow I missed this post , where Brad DeLong dug up a Bob Lucas memoir and made fun of Lucas' college biology class exploits. For reference, here's a longer version of Lucas' story: The only science course I took in college was Natural Sciences II - a biology course. We read a modern anatomy text, and also selections from Darwin, Mendel, and others...  [T]here was nothing spooky about Mendel’s genetic theories. They were clear, they made some kind of sense (though there was nothing molecular in our Nat Sci II readings), you could work out predictions that would surprise you, and these predictions matched interesting facts. We did a classroom experiment with fruit flies, focused on eyes, and pooled the results. Our assignment was to write up the results in a lab report and compare them to predictions from a Mendelian model. I had not enjoyed the actual l...
Read more

Russ Roberts predicts my policy positions

Image
Earlier this year, there was an interesting debate between Russ Roberts of EconTalk and Adam Ozimek of Forbes about ideology and economics. Basically, Roberts (mostly on Twitter) took the cynical position that ideology governs much of people's stances on policy positions, that this is inevitable, and that we should just accept it. Ozimek said no , economists aren't as ideological as Roberts thinks, even commentators in the public sphere. He also said that if you find that your own positions are driven by ideology, it's a sign that maybe you should rethink how you form your positions. More recently, the argument flared up again. Roberts declared the following: Then one day I realized that if I knew one policy position of an economist, I could predict the others ones. 3/ — Russell Roberts (@EconTalker) October 20, 2015 I then challenged Russ to predict my positions on various policies. Initially I suggested that I would tell him three of my positions, and then name three oth...
Read more