Sunday, June 14, 2009

D-squared x 2

Daniel Davies has a piece up on Crooked Timber called "In Praise of Generalized Non-Parametric Deconvolution" that is as fine a piece of expository writing as you will ever see. Despite the forbidding title, you really ought to give it a look. Even if you care not a whit for macroeconomic theory, his explanation of the term in the title is a marvel of clarity and should be appreciated for that alone. So, at least read the first half of the post.

Also, read the final paragraph, even if you don't make it through every word leading up to it. (When you get to "gold standard," will you think of "apples and oranges?")

His next post, "The BNP and the Egging Laffer Curve," is lighter and also well worth a read. It does presume a passing familiarity with the Laffer Curve. If you don't have that, the first two paragraphs of the Wikipedia entry should suffice for this purpose. And yeah, even though that's its real name, "Laffer" gives a hint about the tone of D2's post.

As one measure of how good the post is, after being up on the Web for only two days, it is already sixth on the list when you Google Laffer Curve, which, when you consider how many quadrillions of electrons fans of Reagan-style economics have spilled trying to extol this theory in Serious Articles, tells you a lot about two things.

(So, uh, maybe you've already read it, in which case, why haven't you told me about it?)

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