Jacob Christensen

Daniel Little interviews Charles Tilly who died yesterday.

The entire series is here.

I don’t have any personal links to Tilly but when I was involved in a project on the history and development of the Danish public administration back in the early 1990s, Tilly’s work on the development of Western European states was among our sources for inspiration.

• European Commission – Economic and Financial Affairs – Macro-economic forecasts
  Growth moderates, price pressures a worry but, overall, EU weathers external headwinds rather well
  (tags: economy europe denmark economicpolicy)

This Monday, Gianni Alemanno was elected mayor of Rome. The Guardian reports:

On Monday night, the area around Rome’s city hall rang to chants of “Duce! Duce!”, the term adopted by Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, equivalent to the German “Führer”. Supporters of the new mayor gave the fascist Roman straight-arm salutes.

I remember listening to a Danish radio programme back in the 1990s which debated why Italian Fascism is seen as harmless compared with German Nazism and the participants – who were experts on Italy and Germany, respectively¹ – argued that there is a long history – ranging back to before WWI – of demonising Germans while Italians generally are represented as spontaneous and essentially harmless beings.

You are free to imagine how international media would have reported a similar incident in Munich.

1. In case anybody wonder, I think the participants were Thomas Harder and Per Øhrgaard [↩]

Frankfurter Allgemeine reports that Wolfgang Wagner will be resigning as head of the Bayreuther Festspiele at the tender age of 88.

Picking a successor is a bit more complicated as family relations in the Wagner clan have more in common with the conflicts and alliances involved in the Hundred Years’ War than with anything even remotely like 21st century artistic management.

And the real question is: If you want to attend a decent production of one of Opa Wagner’s works, where should you go? My hunch is that Bayreuth isn’t the centre of the Wagnerian Universe these days. That Wagner was a trailblazer in the development of the modern event economy is another matter.

• Collected Advice for the Young Economists
  (tags: academia)

Jeremy Freese considers what might have been had his life taken another turn and asks:

Does anybody else have a counterfactual career they wonder about?

As it is, I did actually consider switching from Political Science to Economics at one point during my first year at university. Back in 1993 I also unexpectedly faced the choice between taking a job at the Danish Ministry of Health or go for the research grant which eventually produced my biography of K.K. Steincke.

On a less – or perhaps more – serious note, I actually got higher marks in French and Maths than in Social Science at my high school exam, so maybe I should have been a French mathematician. Of cause I have hardly spoken a word of French since 1983 and done pathetically little maths.

Stig Ørskov in Politiken argues that the Danish housing market may soon be in for some serious headaches.

Note: In Denmark lenders have been very creative during the last ten years, for instance by offering “paused morgages”, i.e. loans where the borrower only pays interest but no repayment. This can turn into something very scary interesting during a recession.

According to SvT’s Rapport, 135 local councils in Sweden report a lack of housing.

Note: The term “lack of housing” is ambiguous. As this is state public service TV, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the reporter had some kind of “objective” measure for perceived need and not demand at market prices in mind. Anyway, I would still argue that Sweden lacks a comprehensive housing policy.

• Monetary policy must respond to the housing market | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
  Recent housing finance innovations have changed the relationship between house prices and the business cycle. This column suggests that these changes amplify spillovers from the housing sector to the rest of the economy and recommends that monetary policy
  (tags: economics housing fiscalpolicy economicpolicy)
• IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) – Housing and the Business Cycle, April 2008
  (tags: economics finance housing imf statistics economicpolicy)
• porting: OpenOffice.org Aqua for Mac OS X
  (tags: OpenOffice opensource software osx)
• Scott McCloud: Online Comics
  (tags: art comics webcomics)

The New York Times brings us proof that parallel universes exist. A reporter has visited a parallel Copenhagen:

It’s that rare civic-minded metropolis where everyone lines up for every service, the trains all run on time and no one crosses the street against the light.

Sure, and if you visit this Copenhagen, you might want to watch out for the flying pigs.

According to my dashboard, these are the most popular search terms for people who visit this site:

jacob christensen

catastrophic but not serious

You are free to draw your own conclusions.

Inspired by Unfogged which has a much more fascinating list.