24 January 2011 (PM)

Workout notes I might be getting a quad/hamstring imbalance. Sometimes when I do the stretch in which you stand on one leg, grab the ankle of the other leg and draw your foot up to your butt (ideally), the hamstring in my bent leg starts to cramp.

Note: I sometimes do it both ways: note that the foot can be grabbed by the arm on the same side or the opposite side.

So, what am I going to do about it? I’ll probably have to add hamstring curls and an exercise such as this one:

Personal photos
Spot the Dork, 2011

Hint: I am dressed for indoor running and am wearing a blue shirt…toward the middle.

Spot the Dork, 1973

I am number 64 in both photos; we wore old orange Johnson High jerseys. Note how lumbering I look, though I am about to engage in a gang tackle. I’ve never been graceful in my life; note the long pad on my lower right shin; I had broken my fibula a couple of months earlier.

Politics
From Gov. Pawlenty:

Great trailer, Governor! When does this come out on DVD??

Hey, Republicans think that reality should correspond to movies so this will probably play well with the base.

Economics
Paul Krugman uses the idea of baby-sitting coops to explain certain kinds of economic problems.

Of course, many will be closed to economic facts because it doesn’t fit their fantasies:

Something really strange has happened to the debate over economic policy in the face of the Great Recession and its aftermath — or maybe the real point is that events have revealed the true nature of the debate, stripping away some of the illusions. It’s a bigger story than any one point of dispute — say, over the size of the multiplier, or the effects of quantitative easing — might suggest. Basically, in the face of what I would have said is obviously a massive shortfall of aggregate demand, we’re seeing on all-out attack on the very notion that the demand side matters.

This isn’t entirely new, of course. Real business cycle theory has been a powerful force within academic economics for three decades. But my sense is that the RBC guys had very little impact on public or policy discussion, simply because what they said seemed (and was) so disconnected from actual experience.

Now, however, we’re seeing a much more widespread attack on demand-side economics. More than that, it’s becoming clear that many people don’t so much disagree with the idea that demand matters as find it abhorrent, incomprehensible, or both. I fairly often get comments to the effect that I can’t possibly believe what I’m saying about monetary or fiscal policy, that no sensible person could believe that printing money or engaging in deficit spending will increase output and employment — never mind that all I’m saying is what Econ 101 textbooks have been saying for the last 62 years.

So what’s going on here? [...]

He makes a point about Say’s law and then makes a second point:

Second, the reasons so many people find the notion of inadequate demand abhorrent are, in part, bound up with notions of morality. I’ve been writing a bit about monetary morality in the context of inflation and the gold standard; but this goes deeper than policy. It’s becoming clear to me that a substantial number of writers on economics find the whole idea that the economy can suffer because people are too thrifty, insufficiently willing to spend, deeply repugnant. I’m the sort of person who finds the notion that sometimes virtue is vice and prudence folly interesting; but it’s clear that a number of people find that notion just plain evil. The world shouldn’t be like that — and therefore it isn’t.

See: if something violates a moral sensibility of a conservative, then it can’t be good and the principle can’t be true! Further on:

It’s kind of shocking if you think about it. Here we have a huge, hard-won intellectual achievement [Keynesian economics], one that accounts very well for the world we actually see, and yet it’s being thrown away because it doesn’t go along with ideological preconceptions. Once that sort of thing starts, where does it stop? The next thing you know, the theory of evolution will get the same treatment. Oh, wait.

In other words, the hard headed, hard core trickle down types are the creationists of economics! That is a good way to view Republicans, isn’t it? Global warming isn’t real because, well, God is in charge? Evolution is false because it is unbiblical.

I had an argument with a Republican yesterday; he denied global warming as a hoax that corrupt scientists were pushing because, well, they were mean in some e-mails, (true, but it didn’t falsify their claims), Mars was going though a warming trend (true, but irrelevant; solar activity had nothing to do with it) and that it is cold and snowy right now!

Anyway, if want such rabble to elect you in a primary, well, Gov. Pawlenty’s reality show trailer ad will probably do the trick.

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