Word: economists
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...Those who support NAMA say Ireland has little option but to take the plunge. The International Monetary Fund has predicted that Irish banks could lose up to $53 billion next year if they fail to get rid of their toxic assets. For Pat McCloughan, a Dublin-based economist, the looming bankruptcy threat outweighs all other concerns. "Unfortunately, developers going out of business and home repossessions are an inevitable part of [the downturn]. But a much bigger problem would be if one of the big banks was to fail. That would have massive repercussions for a small country like Ireland...
...sumo wrestlers cheat, why drug dealers are poor, the socioeconomic patterns of naming children - the book Freakonomics brought economic analysis to bear on unexpected and quirky issues and came up with unexpected and quirky answers. It's little surprise, then, that the 2005 book - by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner - sold more than 3 million copies worldwide...
...forecasts that food production will need to double by 2050 in order to keep up with rising demand, a task that will require $30 billion of investment annually. "Governments are scrambling to fix some of the problems, but it will take time," says Akmal Siddiq, a natural-resources economist at the Asian Development Bank in Manila. Farmers like Namdeo Sidam, 48, know that all too well. He, his wife and three sons live in a mud-walled shack in the fly-infested village of Marathwakadi in Vidarbha, and aside from a free plow, the government's ample funds have...
Four years ago, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner produced a sensation. Their book, Freakonomics, described how Levitt and a few other scholars used the techniques of economics to examine quirky topics and controversial ones. There was a chapter on cheating among sumo wrestlers, another on the profitability of drug-dealing, yet another on the possible link between liberalized abortion laws and falling crime rates - and much more (the subtitle was A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything...
...topics in which Levitt specializes have been pushed aside by the big questions of how to halt a financial crisis and fix an ailing global economy. Macroeconomics has overwhelmed microeconomics. Not that the macroeconomists have exactly covered themselves with glory. Queen Elizabeth II wondered aloud late last year how economists had missed the problems that brought on the financial crisis. This September, economist Paul Krugman lamented "the profession's blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy," unleashing a bitter debate over what the heck economics is good...