Word: bauman
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...county fair in Baltimore's southern suburbs, Kratovil encounters Bob Bauman, 63, in a straw hat and a shirt adorned with an enormous bald eagle and an American flag. "I've been trying to get an appointment with you," the Severna Park native says. "We want to talk about the health-care bill from a small-business perspective." Kratovil launches into a list of his problems with the small-business provisions in the House bill. The two men exchange cards, and Kratovil promises to follow up. But as Bauman departs, he remains a Kratovil skeptic. "The jury's still...
...funny economists in the world," says R. Preston McAfee, a California Institute of Technology economics professor and Yahoo! research fellow who presided over the evening. But despite their rarity, some of these academics have attracted wide followings--admittedly, among those who can laugh at supply-demand curves. Yoram Bauman, a professor at the University of Washington, bills himself as the World's First and Only Stand-Up Economist*--but insists on the asterisk to honor exceptions like Ben Stein, who played the stupefyingly boring teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Bauman does a killer parody of Greg Mankiw, chairman...
...comedians." For attendees, it's the biggest night of the conference: boisterous comic relief to end a week packed with enticingly titled seminars such as "Arbitrageur of Capital" and "Dynamics of Asset Returns and Liquidity." "Microeconomists are wrong about specific things, and macroeconomists are wrong about things in general," Bauman quips during his set. "Particularly having successfully predicted nine out of the last five recessions." It's funnier if you're familiar with the inherent tense dichotomy between micro- and macroeconomic schools of thought. With this crowd, it kills...
...evening involve bashing U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, President Bush and just about everyone on Wall Street. "Italian Mafia are gangsters who make offers you can't refuse, whereas financial mafia are bankers who make you loans you can't understand," jokes Bauman. "I'm not sure which is worse...
Despite universal concern over the state of the global economy, few attendees agreed on what should be done to fix it. "It's typical that if you have five economists in the room, you'll get six different opinions," Bauman says, after the show. Nevertheless, the prevailing view by the end of the conference is that things are unlikely to get any better without some sort of government intervention. "Even the hard-core free-market thinkers are reconsidering their stance nowadays," he notes. That's a sobering thought. Which could be why economists need a laugh right...