John Authers interviews Richard Thaler

http://www.ft.com/cms/bfba2c48-5588-11dc-b971-0000779fd2ac.html?_i_referralObject=1107357154&fromSearch=n
Richard Thaler is one of the main scholars of behavioral economics. He is a professor at the University of Chicago. He just published Nudge.

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Nye stirs controversy

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Scholars are paying less attention to questions about how their work relates to the policy world, and in many departments a focus on policy can hurt one’s career.
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A survey of articles published over the lifetime of the American Political Science Review found that about one in five dealt with policy prescription or [...]

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Rachman: Modernizers in Afghanistan

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Both the Pakistan and the Afghan governments are key allies of the west in the conflict formerly known as the “war on terror”. But is it also our business to prevent Afghans and Pakistanis waging a “war on women”?
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The very phrase “exit strategy” acknowledges that we are on our way out. Once [...]

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Cuban understatement

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“Clearly, the Obama administration is re-examining US policy towards Cuba,” said Peter DeSchavo, analyst at the Centre for Strategic International Studies. “It would be an understatement to say that the embargo has not achieved what it was supposed to achieve.”

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An aspect of the Japenese stimulus

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The stimulus also raised the amount that a parent can give a child without incurring inheritance tax to Y5m until the end of 2010, provided the money is used to buy a home.
The goal is to encourage elderly Japanese with large financial assets to transfer them to their children, who are more likely to [...]

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Niall Ferguson: The Axis of Upheavel

Ferguson recently published Ascent of Money. He writes very well and was a special talent to come up with these witty expressions. 
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The bad news for Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, is that he now faces a much larger and potentially more troubling axis—an axis of upheaval. This axis has at least nine members, and [...]

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Frydman and Goldberg on Asset Price Swings

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One possible measure is to announce “guidance ranges” for asset prices, with targeted variations of margin and capital requirements, not to eliminate, but to help damp down movements outside these ranges. The key feature of these measures is that they are applied differently depending on whether an asset is over- or undervalued relative to [...]

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Brazil, India, South Africa

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But a more compelling challenge to the current world order may be emerging from an unlikely trio of countries that boast both impeccable democratic credentials and serious global throw weight. They are India, Brazil and South Africa and their little-noticed experiment in foreign policy coordination since 2003 to promote subtle but potentially far-reaching changes [...]

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Williamson on the Washington Consensus

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There are several issues that were not included in the Washington Consensus: shared prosperity, regulation, strong global institutions, and the environment. In the case of shared prosperity (income distribution) there was no inclusion in the Washington Consensus because, rightly or wrongly (I fear rightly), I did not judge that the fate of the poor [...]

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Chanda warns against protectionism

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For instance, two-thirds of the US stimulus package is devoted to infrastructure, healthcare, clean energy and climate control initiatives in which political influence, rather than efficiency-driven market principles, will determine the allocation of resources. Politically powerful lobbies win, while the principle of free trade is pushed under the (domestically manufactured) bus.

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