Enda

I'm sure the people around the border know, but it's not very public information. McKevitt (Omagh bomber) was basically court-martialed in the Republic for membership and imprisoned about ten years ago.

He's a member of your Parliament, and it's an attempt to prevent future murders.

I've never been as excited by a signing as I was by Bent. I think he's going to be immense for us this season. Our best value for money signings in my time have been McGrath, Yorke, and Barry. Most astute signing (but mostly because of the moving him to central midfield idea) was probably James Milner. (Honourable mention to Enda Stevens, who single-handedly made my name understandable to everyone in VP.)

Two sides that hated each other have moved on, put down their guns, swallowed their pride and shook hands. And here we are bitching at each other. Typical internet, eh? Well done, Martin. I'll never vote for you or your party but at least you don't kill people anymore. Well done Queenie. As it happens nobody will ever vote for you either, but at least you're classy. In conclusion, here's a picture of Bilbo giving it loads.

Reckon Bin Laden would be elected by your fellow UK citizens as a Member of Parliament within twenty years, do you? Queen Elizabeth's own son is the colonel-in-chief of the British soldiers that decided to massacre innocent marchers in McGuinness' home city, and then take forty years to admit it. Elizabeth is also the head of state of a nation whose government refuse to release files to the Irish government about British security involvement in blowing up 26 innocent people (plus one unborn) in Dublin. I doubt McGuinness brought these issues up. Why? Both sides are moving on. Yours is a dangerous, chip-on-the-shoulder, stuck-in-the-past attitude that would continue the bloodshed, be it in Derry or in Birmingham. Two people shaking hands. Not a huge deal, but it's the type of thing that stops war/terrorism and saves lives. It's great that it's happened, and just a pity it didn't happen sooner.

Funny. Ha lol, even. Very promising signing. He could be mecca for us.

Bang on the money. You've got it wrong: it's only been ten years. The Queen last visited the Northern Irish people who pay her salary in 2002. Now now, since when does the Crown Prosecution Service care about catching the bastards who actually bombed Birmingham?

Speaking as a design professional I find these program's too limiting so I use MS Paint, it really helps make those finer details stand out. I work in an Italian fashion house so I know that MS Paint is really the only option.

Americans. Like, Oh My God, like. Oh My God. Super.

We did it with Stephen Ireland.

That's a good bit harder when you've emigrated to the US.

Certain. Might just leave it until Villa play in Chicago in July and I can see them in the flesh. Unless someone would be so kind as to post up a photo of their shirt compared to another season's.... :winkold:

How? A Macron small is a Nike medium.I'm trying to decide which size to buy. What "Nike medium" do you mean? I think they added a couple of inches midway through the contract. Have a look: The old medium (the acorns one) fits me perfectly, but last year's medium was very baggy.

Cast of Cheers' new album just released. Choons.

Ah, the Shank. Much respect headed to Basingstoke. (Never thought I'd say that.)

That's quite a lot of references to miss, in a book review. Especially when the claim he makes is that the person he's criticising has overlooked something... Well played :oops: As I was saying, I'll try stay out of this thread :winkold:

(Right, last bit on Steve Keen: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3VRC3MZQZT89P is a **** magisterial take-down by Herb Gintis.)

That's by far the gayest thing I've ever read on VT.

Villa fans. Moan? Surely not! I'm sick of this type of comment.

DSGE can do whatever you want them to do. Say you want a model with endogenous capital, labour supply, and output. Then you need to specify three equations to link them together. If you want to add a housing market, you need to specify another equation linking it into the system. You're welcome to do whatever you want to include a banking sector. It's all very ad hoc, but at least you can add as many bells and whistles as you like. No, I don't mean can DSGE models include a banking sector, I mean isn't it the case that they tend to overlook the role of debt because they are based on the idea of exogenous money creation No. They tend to overlook debt (or at least have prior to the financial crisis) because macroeconomists don't understand debt. Why is 60% of GDP okay but 600% isn't, or why not 6% instead of 60% is not well understood. What's really so special about ~90%? Sure there's historical evidence, but why that level? Overlooking it is not because of any assumption of exogenous money creation, or any assumption on anything else. (Truth be told, and I know this sounds funny, but macroeconomists don't have a very good explanation of why people accept money in the first place.) I'd be impressed if your university notes covered debt in a DSGE framework . But fair enough, I for one will step back a bit.

Dinosaur Jr - R.E.M. - Active Child - The Smiths - Pixies -

DSGE can do whatever you want them to do. Say you want a model with endogenous capital, labour supply, and output. Then you need to specify three equations to link them together. If you want to add a housing market, you need to specify another equation linking it into the system. You're welcome to do whatever you want to include a banking sector. It's all very ad hoc, but at least you can add as many bells and whistles as you like. Never heard of him if I'm honest. I'd be suspicious that it's spurious, since these cycles should be unpredictable and every fibre in my body tells me that something so complex can't possibly be captured that simply. (Wouldn't it be great if it could, though?) The other links you provide are great, thanks. I'd much rather if the likes of Simon Wren-Lewis got media attention at the expense of the likes of Steve Keen. Haven't seen any economics paper reference Kim Kardashian before, but I do know that one economist in Berkeley tries to sneak "Johnny Depp" into each of his papers.

I would agree that NK is essentially neo-classical with frictions. That's an accurate assessment, and I think most New Keynesians would accept that too. I disagree that the tweaks are trivial. (Though I would be generally sympathetic to the view that small frictions like status quo bias have a big effect on the world.) The most pertinent example of this non-triviality is that there is a role for central banks to affect money supply in a simple NK model, but not in a simple neo-classical model. That's very significant when you want to consider the effects of money/debt/finance. You're right that he was correct on the role of debt, and in pointing towards Minsky in that regard. That's his contribution, and well done to him. But he has demonstrated an enormous lack of mastery of what everyone else is doing. He regularly makes howlers (e.g. perfect competition and no money as "principles" of DSGE; general equilibrium theory being "false" unless preferences are of Gorman form) so you need to discount his credentials. What's more, prediction itself should be treated a little bit cautiously in economics. I'm not saying this to defend economists' ability to predict. Not at all. The second reason is the endogeneity/self-fulfilling nature of predictions. As I said earlier if we could confidently predict that stock prices would rise by 25% in 2013, the price shouldn't wait around and should rise tomorrow. Nobody knows when this consensus might form to inspire changes, so economic predictions are always going to be influenced somewhat by luck. The second point, as Nassim Taleb very nicely points out in 'Fooled by Randomness', is that society vastly over-rates those that turn out lucky. What matters at least as much as a previous ability to predict is a consistency in your analysis that will encourage future correct predictions. Economics also has one season wonders. The fact that Keen is all over the shop means you should at least consider the potential that he is a Francis Jeffers.

Did you read the comments below that short piece? It's striking how many of them criticise Krugman for a lazy, inaccurate critique of Keen based on leaving out (or probably not having read in the first place) the immediately following bit where Keen specifically talks about the sticky prices which Krugman says he doesn't acknowledge. Several of them suggest that a retraction and an apology by Krugman would be in order. They mostly appear to be people generally sympathetic to Krugman, who think he's simply wrong in what he says here, and patronising and high-handed in his lofty dismissal. If you look at "Debunking Economics", Keen deals with DSGE models and explains why he finds them wanting. Seriously? You're criticising Keen based on a sentence someone has written about him on Wiki? I can see why Krugman dislikes Keen so much - they are both bitchy about each other, and Keen doesn't endear himself by speaking of Krugman as a dog walking on its hind legs, stating that he has written about Minsky without understanding him, saying that were he Keen's student he would have failed him for inadequate work, and so on. But from what I've seen of the debate, Keen appears to have done far more by way of setting out what Krugman has said and then pulling it apart, where Krugman comes across as not engaging with the arguments, and trying to simply dismiss him like the lord of the manor brushing away the tradesman. It does him no favours. Overlook the fact that it's Krugman and look at the substance of the points. Keen says that barter systems and perfect competition are "underlying principles" of DSGE models. That's just not true. I have seen DSGE models with financial sectors/money markets, for starters. I have seen DSGE models that don't have well-adjusting equilibrium properties, i.e. where government interference improves things. I have seen DSGE models with market power. And the entire basis of New Keynesian economics is the inability of firms to set prices "well" and where central banks can then play a role, i.e. you're not dealing with perfectly adjusting perfectly competitive markets acting seamlessly in a barter economy; you're dealing with the opposite. Thus I conclude that either he doesn't get DSGE very well or he really doesn't get New Keynesianism. This is compounded by the fact NK models aren't even necessarily DSGE models. (I admit that Krugman is very unclear on this point.) I know why DSGE models are wanting. I'd argue, even based only on the above, that I understand their failures at least as well as Keen does. If you really want to critique DSGE look no further than Cogley and Nason's article in the American Economic Review, published in roughly 1995. That's a serious, well-founded, specific critique of DSGE modelling. Keen is hand-waving, and mixing things up. I used the wiki sentence as an example of Keen screwing things up. Maybe the wiki sentence is wrongly attributed to Keen and in that case then I of course withdraw the comment. But it's an example among others such as the article I linked to in a physics journal where he does something that might appear as useful to the untrained eye, but ultimately is misleading.

Do you want to back that up with a counter argument showing what he's got wrong? Of course. It's well-trodden ground, so I'm going to reference other people's critiques too. One of the dominant frameworks in macroeconomics is Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models. Personally I don't like them very much at all, but I at least know what they are and understand what's going on. As Paul Krugman notes, Steve Keen doesn't understand what's going on in DSGE models. Under the most generous interpretation of this debate, Keen doesn't seem to understand so-called New Keynesian modelling. Have a gander at Keen's wiki page. It claims Keen's work "has also focused on refuting the neoclassical theory of the firm, which argues that firms will set marginal revenue equal to marginal cost. Keen notes that empirical research finds real firms set price well above marginal cost: they charge a markup, often cost-plus pricing." There are many things wrong with this. First of all, setting marginal revenue equal to marginal cost is *not* the same thing as setting price equal to marginal cost. In only crazy theoretical examples (i.e. perfect competition) does price equal marginal revenue. In other cases, it does not. What's more, in the New Keynesian models that Keen was complaining about in the previous paragraph, it is often assumed that firms charge 'cost-plus' pricing. This sort of stuff is pretty elementary - it's taught to undergrads. For example, see equation 7 on page 4 of these Trinity College undergrad notes here. As it happens, the author of those notes has commented on Steve Keen's work. The summary is that his work is an odd, faux-scientific restatement of comments made others with better understanding than Keen. In the same vein, John Quiggin calls him to task here. For example, "Keen generally uses the term 'economics' to refer to the simplified version of neoclassical economics taught to first year undergraduates." So either he's unaware of the grown-up stuff, or he avoids dealing with it. Even while restricting it to the simple version of economics that is distilled to 18 year olds, he screws it up. As Quiggin says, "[he] is simply wrong." All of this leads to his "most celebrated" work, downloadable here. Here he makes the remarkable claim that the "optimal level of strategic interaction between competing firms is zero", i.e. they make higher profits if they do not compete. No shit, Sherlock. The problem, of course, is that in his model, each firm has the incentive to cheat on that agreement. Strange how he fails to mention this, but this is obvious to anyone with a decent training in economics. This is why it's published in a physics journal and not an economics one. He's a bullshit peddler, pure and simple, and it's a pity he has risen to prominence in intelligent non-specialist circles. do you mean IS-LM? No. I have a few thoughts on it. 1. The IS-LM model is almost a century old and is based on monetary rules that stopped existing decades ago. 2. Accordingly IS-LM does not enter any economist's head when they think about the macroeconomy. Modern macro was invented in 1936. IS-LM was first published (iirc) in 1937. It's pre-history, and has been completely superseded by AS-AD models, Solow-type models, DSGEs, etc etc. 3. Keen isn't breaking any ground when criticising the teaching of IS-LM. He's simply joining the debate; see here, here, here, or here. I'm sure Keen knows IS-LM; that doesn't excuse his other howlers. 4. I don't think it should be taught to undergrads. I don't think it's taught in the university where I work. 5. I don't object to teaching IS-LM to undergrads as a stepping stone to understanding something more reasonable. This is the logic of the author of the leading undergrad textbook.