Economic Dreams - Economic Nightmares I spent most of my working life in the US Forest Service, battling fundamentalism. Most of the battles dealt with economics. My first job was to coordinate use of a linear programming model (FORPLAN) in the development of forest plans. I remember one day in 1979, before I joined the Forest Service, having lunch with FORPLAN developer K. The FORPLAN Fiasco During the early years of US Forest Service "forest planning" (1979-1985, generally) there was a big problem with what we then called "analytical determinism." Rational-Planning Economics In about 1983 I took a step upward (so I thought) in the Forest Service, moving from Regional Operations Research Analyst to Regional Economist for the Intermountain Region. But long before then I began research into who else was in the battle against government rational planning economics. Ed Cone sums up the idea of "market worship", talking about the 2007-2008 financial implosion: As for the public lands, they want the government to disappear.
illusions rule the world Daniel W. Drezner | FOREIGN POLICY Debt to the Penny (Daily History Search Application) You are in: Individual | Institutional | > Government Home › Government › Reports › Public Debt Reports › Debt to the Penny Log in now Set up an account The Debt to the Penny and Who Holds It ( Debt Held by the Public vs. See information on the Debt Subject to the Limit. Daily History Search Application To find the total public debt outstanding on a specific day or days, simply select a single date or date range and click on the 'Find History' button. The data on total public debt outstanding is available daily from 01/04/1993 through 04/22/2014. Yearly (on a fiscal basis) from 09/30/1997 through 09/30/2001. Adam Smith Lives! The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University is sponsoring an Undergraduate Ethics Symposium April 8-10, 2010. This conference is shaped around a series of workshops in which students present to one another their best work on a subject of ethical concern. I write to invite you to encourage your faculty to bring this event to the attention of their students. A Call for Essays and Creative Writing Projects is attached, and a tentative schedule for the symposium, which will be frequently updated, is available on our website: The students whose works are accepted for the symposium will benefit from the critiques and comments of their peers in the seminar, and also from the visiting scholar or creative writer who will direct the workshop. Sincerely, Martha Rainbolt Coordinator, Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics
Inflation Calculator | Find US Dollar's Value from 1913-2013 The Adam Smith Institute Blog Ezra Klein has launched his new site, Vox.com, with an essay on ‘how politics makes us stupid’. The piece is provocative, and Klein uses some interesting examples. Most striking is the study that shows that people’s maths skills get worse when the problem they’re dealing with has a political element and goes against their political instincts. (Klein seems to have slightly misunderstood the study he’s written about, but his basic point stands.) The basic claim is that people engage in ‘motivated reasoning’ when they think about politics – in other words, they think in order to justify what they already believe, not in order to discover the truth. This ‘identity-protective cognition’, as he calls it, makes sense – a pundit who decides that the other side is right about some particular political issue (Klein uses global warming as an example) has a lot to lose in terms of status within the group they’re part of, and little to gain by being right. That’s where an ideology comes in.
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