Assorted — Economics, Mueller Report, etc
1. Passengers May Pay a Lot More. Drivers Won’t Accept Much Less.
2. A Financial Checklist for Your Newly Minted High School Graduate
3. Why a Tax the U.S. Hasn’t Embraced Has Found Favor in Much of the World
4. Remember the ‘10,000 Hours’ Rule for Success? Forget About It
5. Operating Manual for Economists
Just as medical students must be seasoned as interns, the IMF teaches its new economists how to transition from a theoretical, model-driven view of an economy to an understanding of how a real country’s economy actually behaves. Like the human body, a country’s economy reflects the composite operation of many specialized “macro” organs — the real economy, the fiscal sector, and the monetary and financial sectors — that interact with one another and with the rest of the world. Understanding the nitty-gritty of how these different organs function, and whether they are performing well, is as much art as science.
The IMF’s approach to such an education relies in part on an apprenticeship model and in part on short bursts of training from its teaching and capacity development unit. This wise book, Macroeconomics for Professionals — the collaboration of two former senior IMF staffers — distills the essence of the basic analytical framework the IMF uses to understand a country’s economic reality.
Leslie Lipschitz and Susan Schadler provide a superb road map for assessing a country’s policies. It is relevant not only for new IMF economists but also for analysts in investment banks, rating agencies, finance ministries, and central banks, as well as for economic journalists seeking to bridge the gap between theory and real-world practice. Indeed, this book would enhance economics training in graduate schools of public policy.
8. The IMF Can (and Must) Disrupt Itself
9. Clare Akamanzi explains how Rwanda is encouraging private sector development
10. The United Stats of America with FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver
11. “The Axe Files” with Bob Woodward & host David Axelrod
12. Reid Hoffman: ‘You Can’t Just Sit on the Sidelines’
13. Fireside Chat with Peter Norvig