My favorite blog just happens to be on economics. It is Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal. There are several other economics blogs that I read regularly. I am very fond of Robert Reich’s site, although it isn’t really a blog. There are three other blogs that I regularly read: Dean Baker’s Beat the Press, Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality with the Invisible Hand, and Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View. Despite what I’m about to say, they are all excellent.

I read these guys for two reasons:

1. They are way smarter than I, and (with all due humility, which is not much) that’s saying something.
2. Economics makes my little physicist brain hurt.[1]

The Solo Quote

Some of this blogging is a waste, because they all read and quote each other (except for Reich, who, as I said, isn’t really blogging). The worst offender is Brad DeLong because he will often quote entire articles of other people. In these cases, he adds nothing. Okay, not nothing. He tells me about the existence of someone else’s work. But this isn’t the way to do it. Especially in DeLong’s case, he often quotes very long articles. This is unethical, because if the reader wants the whole article, he should go to the original site. It is also a waste of time. For example, in JOSEPH GOEBBELS LIVEBLOGS WORLD WAR II: JANUARY 4, 1942, he quotes the entire original article. Instead, he could have just provided a link and the title (which he neglects), which tells what the article contains and whether it is worth the reader’s time: Goebbels’ Plea for Clothing for Troops on the Russian Front & Hitler’s Proclamation (December 20, 1941). It would also be nice if DeLong would add a paragraph to explain why we might care.

Mark Thoma does the same thing, but even more often. It makes matters worse that he often quotes entire articles that I have already read. This is surprising, because Thoma also provides daily lists of articles worth reading.

Quoting is Great

I am all for bloggers quoting other bloggers. But it is important to add value. All of these men have a lot of value to add. But they error when they just transmit someone else’s writing. If it is important enough to quote, it is important enough to expand.

[1] In general, I don’t think Monty Python is that funny. Compared to That Mitchell and Webb Look or Fry and Laurie, they are downright pathetic. But they do have their moments and “My brain hurts!” is one of my favorite catch phrases.

If it weren’t for his ostentatious religiosity, I doubt that anyone would know who Tim Tebow was. So it is ironic that there is such an uproar when there is a little push back against his annoying public displays of religious faith. Bill Maher’s tweet was right on target: “Wow, Jesus just fucked Tim Tebow bad! And on Xmas Eve! Somewhere in hell Satan is tebowing, saying to Hitler ‘Hey, Buffalo’s killing them.'” I mean, what is all that on-field praying all about anyway?

I don’t think anyone really cares about Tebow’s prayers. But they do care about how much positive attention he gets for it. Yeah, the guy is very religious. Do we care? No we don’t. Just shut up about it! And if he were of any other faith, all those who applaud him would be making fun of him. Just like Saturday Night Live:

Via The Daily Telegraph, a pen held inside a woman’s stomach for 25 years still writes. There are about five things from this story that are amazing. Just check out Rachel Maddow’s three minute summary:

I don’t suppose it matters because I’ve already told you I wouldn’t vote for you in 2012 because of the debt ceiling debacle, but you’ve annoyed me even more with your move about not vetoing the defense authorization.

The Republican Party only believes in power. The Democratic Party is much better in this regard. But it is hard to make that argument with decisions like this.

Don’t you believe in anything? It sure isn’t clear.

Today is the beginning of the end for Up with Chris Hayes. I had wondered recently how long the new show would manage to continue to be unapologetically liberal. This morning, for the first time in its young history (as far as I know), it had two conservative panelists—who just happened to get far more talking time than their liberal peers. Yes, the conservatives (Elise Jordan and Reihan Salam) are not of the wacky persuasion. But I fear that is just a matter of time. Up with Chris Hayes in 2014 might well have a panel of Charles Krauthammer, George Will, David Brooks, and Leslie Sanchez. Sanchez is the liberal.

Many years ago, a friend told me that Bill Gates makes so much money that if he saw a $100 bill, it would not be worth his time to pick it up. Most of us are not in this category, but still struggle with whether we should pick up smaller value currency, like the penny. My mother always picked up pennies. She had a fondness for both superstition and poetry, and so could often be heard quoting the following poem:

So I understood whenever my mother would pick up a penny, she did it because she thought it was lucky. But other people have told me that they pick up pennies because they represent free money. But they aren’t. Pennies on the ground don’t just magically transport themselves into your pocket. It takes effort to cash in on this apparent free money.

In order to determine just what these pennies are worth, I poured a bunch of them at my feet and timed how long it took to pick up ten pennies, one at a time. It took 25 seconds. This means that I could—in theory—pick up 24 pennies in a minute. This comes to $14.40 per hour, or $13.80 per hour when you take into account the California State requirement that workers take a ten minute break every four hours. Overall, that sounds pretty good—substantially above minimum wage, but hardly “1% here I come!” territory.

There is an important aspect of this test that would bring this number way down: I could not keep up this pace for an hour, much less eight hours. But I’m not going to do an experiment. For extended periods of time, I doubt that I could do better than half this rate: 12 pennies per minute. That would bring the hourly pay down to $7.90 per hour—just below minimum wage in California, unless you work in San Francisco, in which case it is far below the $10.24 rate as of the beginning of 2012.

How it was determined that Bill Gates is wasting his time to pick up a $100 bill is easy to determine with a little thought: figured out how much money he makes and divided it by the time it takes to pick up a $100 bill. Who knows if anyone has actually done this calculation. This is typical folklore: the point is what’s important, not the detail.[1] Clearly, picking up $100 bills would result in a pretty good salary if the bills were just sitting around waiting to be picked up (an invalid assumption even for pennies). Just one bill an hour would result in a yearly salary of $200,000—four times the median salary of a worker in the US. But a penny?

Even picking up pennies at a back and knee breaking pace would result, at best, in something like a minimum wage job. A similar job with nickles probably wouldn’t be too bad, but in general, I can’t see that a nickle is really worth the time to pick up, either. Dimes seem like a safe bet and quarters most certainly are. Obviously, any paper money is worth picking up. Regardless of the denomination, however, such money is most definitely not free.

[1] Like most people, I think this is a stupid example. Gates makes his money indirectly by what he owns. So if he managed to pick up an extra $100, it doesn’t lower his productivity.