Odograph.com

An interesting piece by Bruce Bartlett on why he (longtime Republican) has become Anti-Republican:

I think the party got seriously on the wrong track during the George W. Bush years, as I explained in my Impostor book. In my opinion, it no longer bears any resemblance to the party of Ronald Reagan. I still consider myself to be a Reaganite. But I don’t see any others anywhere in the GOP these days, which is why I consider myself to be an independent. Mindless partisanship has replaced principled conservatism. What passes for principle in the party these days is “what can we do to screw the Democrats today.” How else can you explain things like that insane op-ed Michael Steele had in the Washington Post on Monday?

Any similarity to my own evolution is purely ….. coincidental?

Abnormal Returns did a big round-up of “new frugality” articles. It’s something I would have linked to with relish a year or two ago. Now, well I think we’ll have to wait and see how much of this frugality “sticks.”

It is a good list though.

A little data might help here. Unfortunately, there really IS no good data on PCE (personal consumption expenditure) and savings stratified by income percentile. There are a couple of surveys, the triennial “Survey of Consumer Finances” by the Federal Reserve and the “Consumer Expenditure Survey” by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the self-reported data is laughable. For 2007, the Consumer Expenditure Survey showed a personal savings rate of 18.4%. In the same year, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which calculates the savings rate as a residual from actual income and expenditure data, showed a savings rate of 1.7%. Either the Consumer Expenditure Survey does a poor job of sampling, or people who fill out surveys are really big liars.

Andrew Kaplan runs some numbers, makes some guesses, which suggest that most Americans are still in negative-savings territory.

We knew it really, but:

The Baseline Scenario – Causes: Too Much Debt

Menzie Chinn, one of my favorite bloggers, and Jeffry Frieden have a short and highly readable article up on the causes of the financial crisis. Chinn is not given to ideological ranting and is a great believer in actually looking at data, so I place significant weight in what he says.

Chinn and Frieden place the emphasis on excessive American borrowing, by both the public and private sectors.

This disaster is, in our view, merely the most recent example of a “capital flow cycle,” in which foreign capital floods a country, stimulates an economic boom, encourages financial leveraging and risk taking, and eventually culminates in a crash.

I used to drop comments at Marginal Revolution, telling Alex Tabarrok that he should write a “mea culpa on debt.” It was kind of tongue in cheek, but I think it’s also fair to say that even at the peak, mainstream economists “taught” that the debt was the result of rational choices. Obviously, not as much as they believed.

It will be interesting to see if restaurants rebound, after consumers complete their deleveraging, or if this is a new normal.

The Oregon Fly Fishing Blog advises not to fish.

This is one of those handy Lifehacker top-10 lists.

A good round-up at TRUE/SLANT:

[T]he public’s skittishness about overhauling the system also reflects something else: the deep-seated psychological biases that make people resistant to change. Most of us, for instance, are prey to the so-called “endowment effect”: the mere fact that you own something leads you to overvalue it.

more there.

A happier round-up at Naked Capitalism

A sad round-up at Blogfish.