1. Wal-Mart employees know every product’s profit margins, and think their job is preferrable to working at Target and way better than working at a mom-and-pop grocery store. What it’s like working at Wal-Mart, and other rebuttals to Barbara Ehrenreich here:

One of the secrets to Wal-Mart’s success is that it delegates many judgment calls to the sales-floor level, where employees know first-hand what sells, what doesn’t, and (most important) what customers are asking for.

H.T. Carpe Diem

2. Krugman v.s. DeLong on Bernanke. Does Brad’s rule no longer hold in this decade?

  1. Paul Krugman’s analysis is correct.
  2. If you think that Paul Krugman’s analysis is incorrect, see rule number 1.

3. A hilarious painting.

4. Nick Rowe offers a novel explication of the ideas behind Stiglitz and Grossman’s “On the Impossibility of Efficient Markets”:

The downward-sloping (hence “demand”) curve shows the extent to which EMH is true as a function of the extent to which people believe EMH is true.

5. Richard Thaler on mortgage defaults, and the decision to walk away:

Some homeowners may keep paying because they think it’s immoral to default….But does this really come down to a question of morality?… A provocative paper by Brent White, a law professor at the University of Arizona, makes the case that borrowers are actually suffering from a “norm asymmetry.” …they think they are obligated to repay their loans even if it is not in their financial interest to do so, while their lenders are free to do whatever maximizes profits. It’s as if borrowers are playing in a poker game in which they are the only ones who think bluffing is unethical.

6. Curious George as narrated by Werner Herzog:

“nothing in the brutal primeval jungle could prepare George for the terrible, vast, uncaringness of the sea.”

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