Speed blogging

Wow. I feel like my social life is always either feast or famine. The same weekend college friends arrived in bulk, I also have a going away party to go to for my boyfriend's Dad. So, Gotta go in a few minutes, and have no time but to put up some links. In no particular order...

-- First, from Bradford Plumer, some interesting musings on the importance of belonging from a psychological viewpoint. "People who are excluded, socially, for whatever reason are far more unwilling to exert any sort of self-control over themselves:"

-- Getting Serious about the dollar? Or merely political sabre rattling to make it look like we're doing something about a festering problem?

Excuse me. Instead of spending the remainder of my precious, precious minutes putting up more links, I think I'll just rant a little about this hypocrisy instead. The U.S. is trying to put pressure on China for pegging the RMB???? That's like the junkie complaining to his dealer that he must stop selling him more crack. Get it through your heads, people. China is our enabler. They've kept buying our treasury bonds (which is to say that they kept lending us money) for their own shortsighted and selfish reasons. But the pathology, the root of the problem, is U.S. fiscal irresponsibility. And the solution to that problem is both a lot more intransigent and closer to home.

Anyhow. Let's just say that the Chinese actually do what we want them to and allowed the dollar to drop like a stone. What happens next? Will Americans magically start buying U.S. made TV sets and toys and lingerie and thus improving the current account imbalance? I hardly think so. We'll just have to pay more for the crap we're buying, or else stop buying altogether. If the correction is strong enough and sudden enough, we just might be saying hello to global recession. The 'hard landing' scenario, if you will.

Anyhow. Gotta go. My life is projected to return to its usual state of anti-social apathetic listlessness. Which means lots of posts! Including the one that's churning along about why our intro to econ classes fail us and how that relates to the funny place that economics inhabit between science, social science, and black magic.