Tag: slate

In Memoriam: Robert Mundell

Ashish2 Comments

Robert Mundell passed away earlier this week. Most macroeconomics students will know of the Mundell-Fleming model, of course, while a lesser number may have heard of his work on optimum currency areas.

Here is a relatively old article about him from the New York Times:

”In the very short run, I’m a Keynesian,” he said. ”In the intermediate run, I’m a supply-sider, and in the long run I’m a monetarist.”

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/12/business/eccentric-economist-robert-a-mundell-supply-side-s-intellectual-guru.html

And here is a summary by The Economist on the impossible trilemma:

HILLEL THE ELDER, a first-century religious leader, was asked to summarise the Torah while standing on one leg. “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary,” he replied. Michael Klein, of Tufts University, has written that the insights of [[international macroeconomics]] (the study of trade, the balance-of-payments, exchange rates and so on) might be similarly distilled: “Governments face the policy trilemma; the rest is commentary.”

https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2016/08/27/two-out-of-three-aint-bad)

Here is Paul Krugman, first rhapsodizing about the Optimum Currency Area1:

First up, Mundell, whose classic 1961 paper argued that a single currency was more likely to be workable if the regions sharing that currency were characterized by high mutual labor mobility. (He actually said factor mobility, but labor is almost surely the one that matters). How so?

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/revenge-of-the-optimum-currency-area/

.. and then rhapsodizing about Robert Mundell and his early theoretical work:

Those of us who work on international monetary theory have been wondering for a decade when Robert Mundell would get his richly deserved Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Mundell’s work is so central to that field, so “seminal”–an overused term that really applies here–that on many disputed issues his ideas are the basis for both sides of the debate. But a layperson might be confused about exactly what Mundell and his prize are really about.

https://slate.com/business/1999/10/o-canada.html

This is the NYT obituary:

In his 2006 interview, he said that winning the Nobel “was particularly pleasing to me as my work has been quite controversial and no doubt stepped on a lot of intellectual toes.”
He added: “Even more than that, when I say something, people listen. Maybe they shouldn’t, but they do.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/business/economy/robert-mundell-dead.html

And finally, the Washington Post’s obit:

Dr. Mundell gave one of the more unusual — and crowd-pleasing — acceptance speeches in the history of the Nobel Prize. He ended his remarks by singing a few bars of the hit Frank Sinatra song “My Way,” an allusion to the independent-minded approach that he brought to his life and work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/robert-mundell-dead/2021/04/06/36793d92-96d4-11eb-b28d-bfa7bb5cb2a5_story.html

RIP.

  1. This essay, along with the tables, used to be freely available on the NBER website. No longer, and I don’t know why. My apologies[↩]

Tech: Links for 8th October, 2019

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  1. “What we are doing is creating selfies, documenting moments with family, and snapping photos of food and latte art. We aren’t even trying to build a scrapbook of those images. It is all a stream — less for remembrance than for real-time sharing. In other words, we have changed our relationship with photography and photographs. It used to be that, photos served as a portal to our past. Now, we are moving so fast as we try to keep up in the age of infinitesimal attention spans. A minute, might as well be a month ago.”
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    The excellent Om Malik on cameras, art, servers and obsolescence.
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  2. “Around the world, governments are setting timeframes by which all cars are to be electric. Norway is requiring all cars to be zero emission by 2025—and more than 50 percent of its cars today are electric. However, China is winning the race in terms of units, with more than 1 million EVs sold in 2018. The U.S was the second largest market, with 361,000; Norway had 73,000. China and the U.S. are at 4.44 percent and 2.09 percent market penetration, respectively, so there is lots of room for growth. China is stimulating growth with public policy: It aims to have 2 million in annual EV sales by 2020 and to outlaw the internal combustion engine sometime before 2040. France has also committed to a ban by 2040 and the UK by 2050. Governments are seeking to accelerate uptake through a potpourri of incentives, ranging from tax breaks to free parking to fees on conventional cars in low emission zones.”
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    A useful (to me, at any rate) overview of the EV market in the years (decades) to come.
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  3. “In a new book, Mr. Smith makes the case for a new relationship between the tech sector and government — closer cooperation and challenges for each side.“When your technology changes the world,” he writes, “you bear a responsibility to help address the world that you have helped create.” And governments, he writes, “need to move faster and start to catch up with the pace of technology.””
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    On Microsoft’s middle path. I come from a generation that simply could not have predicted this.
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  4. “A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest can deliver sermons and move around to interface with worshippers. But Mindar comes with some … unusual traits. A body made of aluminum and silicone, for starters.Mindar is a robot.”
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    In a sense, unsurprising. But still: religion, rituals and… robots?
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  5. “Christine Figgener, a marine biology grad student aboard the boat, filmed with her phone as a colleague tried to yank some sort of tube from the turtle’s nose. At first, Figgener thought it might be a worm. Then she saw it was a piece of plastic. “Is that a freaking straw?” she exclaimed, outrage blooming in her voice. Indeed, it was. In time, the straw was plucked from the turtle’s nose and the sad, green fellow liberated. But Figgener—who’d been researching turtle behavior in pursuit of her Ph.D. and had seen marine life tormented by plastic junk countless times before—could not stop fuming as the boat returned to shore. It was, if you will, the last straw.”
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    On technology and… straws.