Anyone who has done an interview for television media knows that even though they roll tape and take up your time for up to a half hour, the vast majority of material winds up on the cutting room floor. While I think the points I make in this interview are true, the lead in of the piece is a bit dubious given my conversation with the reporter. The video implies that the success of New Orleans is due in large part because of the large amount of federal funding that came into the area after Katrina. I guess that means we should all be hopeful about stimulus in the wake of crises...

Just to be clear I explicitly told the reporters during my interview that I thought federal and large scale government involvement post-Katrina had done more harm than good. The successful rebuilding and know resilient endurance through the financial crises that New Orleans has experienced is a testament to the power of markets and capitalism.

Caplan's got an interesting post summarizing Portfolio - a book I haven't read. Bryan's most interesting comment about the book:

Yes, the world's poor are striving to better their lot. But what they really need isn't small-scale entrepreneurship and micro-credit. It's employment in the formal sector, and access to international credit markets. What they need, in short, is globalization. Either they need to come to us, or our institutions need to go to them.

In my experience this attention to funneling the bottom classes into the formal sector is explicitly mentioned as a primary goal of microfinance programs, but this leaves a few very important clarifying questions:

1. The typical Austro-Virginian political economy critique: do micro-finance programs have the knowledge or the incentives to accomplish this goal?

2. Do we (economists skeptical of microfinance) or they (microfinance proponents) have a good accounting of the fundamental causes for why these lower class populations are stuck in the illegitimate - dare one say "black market" - sector?

3. Is there a full accounting of all or at least most of the obstacles that may arise with the application of new micro-finance policies?

I share Caplan's general point mostly because I think the answers to number one aren't good because most of the support for microfinance programs are coming from the public or quasi public sectors. I think the answer to number two is a mild yes for we but a resounding no for they. And the response to three is dependent on the answers for one and two.

A great post on modernity:

The total volume is so massive we couldn't consume that top 10% if we tried with all our might... Friedman's problem is that he ignores the countervailing effects of population and wealth. Lots of creative people serving a big market of rich consumers is a recipe for progress - and that is precisely what see we all around us.

On this note I highly recommend: Rip: A Remix Manifesto.

Art Carden at Division of Labor has a great post today on the widespread acceptance of inevitable environmental catastrophe.

a public school teacher in our congregation had been encouraged by the School Board to highlight the "fact" that overpopulation is our #1 environmental problem as part of the Earth Day curriculum. That this is demonstrably false doesn't seem to trouble anyone. In the face of compelling evidence, people cling nonetheless to environmentalist mythology.

Behavioral economists are always so worried that we under-estimate the likelihood of catastrophe's because of cognitive biases and inabilities to deal with very big and very small numbers. But the political sphere seems to have force fitted this issue so that the bias runs the other way.

A while back I posted this question about the political implications of people who believe in an "end of days scenario."

Today I found this interesting post at Offsetting Behavior.

CHRISTOPHER CROWE, International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Abstract: The recent housing bust has reignited interest in psychological theories of speculative excess (Shiller, 2007). I investigate this issue by identifying a segment of the U.S. population--evangelical protestants--that may be less prone to speculative motives, and uncover a significant negative relationship between their population share and house price volatility. Evangelicals' focus on Biblical prophecy could account for this difference, since it may enable them to interpret otherwise negative events as containing positive news, dampening the response of house prices to shocks. I provide evidence for this channel using a popular internet measure of "prophetic activity" and a 9/11 event study. I also analyze survey data covering religious beliefs and asset holding, and find that 'end times' beliefs are associated with a one-third decline in net worth, consistent with these beliefs providing a form of psychic insurance (Scheve and Stasavage, 2006a and 2006b) that reduces asset demand.

Just a small quote, but the video is up this time.

Pete Boettke recently posted a photo of Virgil Storr's office wall - a beautiful arrangement of photographs depicting Virgil's intellectual heritage. I had a similar desire for my own office, but I lack sufficient pictures for the more recent scholars. Instead I settled for the pack of Austrian scholars for sale at mises.org and some custom frames.

Jen Mansfield made these frames especially for me. She is a very talented New Orleans artist and a close personal friend. I highly recommend these frames to anyone interested in re-creating their own intellectual family tree.

Here's lovely reporter, Shelley Brown's write up, but the video segment doesn't appear to be up.