A tale of two demises

It's a bit in the past now, but since the year is not finished yet, not quite too late.
So, 2013 will have seen the death of two major international political figures, one at each end of the year. Indeed, Nelson Mandela (and I doubt that many will have begrudged him that) outlived by 8 months the 7 years younger woman who had called him a terrorist, although it's actually her spokesman who added that whoever thought the ANC could lead South Africa lived "in cloud-cuckoo land".

Some dreams

So, it's again one of those times of the year.

Oh, I don't mean festive food, long evenings with family and friends, and sharing of presents. All that's fine.

No, I mean one of those times when you are expected to lie.

OK, not to adults, not to most adults anyway. But you must be very, very careful not to say anything that may imply the non-existence of a certain fat beardy guy who, somehow, fails to ever be arrested for speeding (on a pretty hazardous vehicle, too) or trespassing, despite numerous alleged occurence, within earshot of a child who may not already be aware of the facts. On the other hand, nobody feels any hesitation in flat out lying in the face of kids who may not have been exposed to superstitious nonsense (and could very well start to believe it).

But the lying brigade has a ready-made explanation: kids need to dream. It is bad for them to learn some truths.

Well, I can't prove otherwise of course, but if they do need to believe in Santa to develop a balanced personality, that would mean that many, many generations must have been traumatised. After all, we are talking, essentially, of an early 20th century creation by the Coca-Cola company.

And it's some dream: if we are to believe the songs that we hear, Big Brother had nothing on him: he knows when you've been good, he knows when you've been bad, he knows when you're sleeping... And the idea is to reward that by an orgy of consumerism without meaning (there cannot be much meaning to a present if the person "presenting" it is supposed to be a mythical being with whom you've never had any contact). By the way, the only logical conclusion for a poor kid would seem to be that he has behaved a lot worse than the rich prat who got spoilt.

No, surely we should never let them imagine that presents might be thoughtgful gestures from people who make them because they love you and sought to convey some meaning through them. That would be nightmarish.

Anyway, I don't pretend to know for sure what's best for people of an age I haven't had in quite a while. But when I look around me, I don't get the impression that our society suffers from a lack of consumerism and an overdose of meaning. And I have to wonder whether shielding kids from the latter by pretending that the former is provided for by some magical being really improves things.

Slow, grinding torture at the hospital

No, nothing to do with a particularly painful treatment. It's merely allergy desensitisation.
However, this means that I need to stay in the waiting room for a whole hour after the injection, in case I have a bad reaction.

And they play BBC1, too loud to be completely screened out. Plus all the seats are facing the giant screen, it's always in your arc of vision.

And this is my typical ordeal:

Some thoughts on secular stagnation

Via Paul Krugman, I saw that Larry Summers had given a presentation on the topic of secular stagnation at the IMF conference (admittedly, I wasn't invited this year, well, the letter must have been lost in the post ;-) ). If you'd rather read than watch, Krugman's summary is a nicely written one, and adds a few comments which can be interesting in themselves.

Well, I have not usually been inclined of late to say nice things about Larry Summers, although that was probably more about Summers the political persona. His academic research deserves more credit. So, much of it is interesting, although some of the conclusions he derives (and here Summers the neoliberal may be showing, for instance when he suggests that proper financial regulation may be a bad thing in the context of stagnation, which is bonkers) appear to either be there purely for provocation sake, or to be pre-conclusions looking for a justification. Still, I would have a few things to add, and I believe that the conclusions fall short in a couple of ways.

A graph that says it all

This is a simple graph (via Paul Krugman) plotting industrial production in the Eurozone since the beginning of the crisis, and in the 30s, from the start of the great Depression.

Actually, Excel graphics make it look better than it really is: in the 30s we only had one point a year, and Excel will plot that in the middle of the interval -which is why the 30s curve does not start from the origin.
In other words, it is lagging by 6 months. So to really get a comparable point to now, you'd need to add 6 months of rebound from the 30s. We are actually much lower, not slightly lower, than at the same point 80 years ago, and of course the momentum is taking us further apart.

Amazing. And the Austerians are congratulating themselves. Hard to argue against that fitting the definition of sociopathy.

The real sovereignty breach

As so often, George Monbiot is a very welcome voice in sounding the alarm.

As we have come to know, the case for free trade agreements had been hyped, and even the honest assessments overstated -Paul Krugman is a notable case of a major enonomist observing that the outcome had been less positive than he had envisaged, in great part because very little if anything was done to address the distributional effects, and also because free movement of workers is mostly an illusion.

But at least you could make a case for it and put it forward as a policy option.

This is not the case of adding to the free trade agreement the creation of secretive (debates are not revealed to the public!) courts, where judges are corporate lawyers, that have power to supersede governments' decisions with no possibility of appeal.
This is pure Corporatist transfer of power slipped in a bill that was sold as facilitating transactions -ie, stealthily renouncing sovereignty. Democracy is becoming Corporatism without the people having a say.

Not what we need. And, I must admit from reading the example that George Monbiot exhibits, the consequences are even worse than I would have thought (for instance, a mine is by essence local. Forcing exploitation has nothing to do with free trade, it is a completely different thing from having deliberately restricted standards to prevent sales of foreign products).

Despite all the posturing about the EU (and it has, indeed, created huge problems in the way the Eurozone was created, but that's not what you hear from the UK press, for instance, since they are not in the Euro), the sovereignty threat is not so much between national and supra-national, but in this establishing a Corporate power that is becoming stronger than the States'.

Sarcasm makes clear

Economics and public policies can seem dry subject sometimes, and there is sufficient disinformation being produced to make even some apparently simple points very confusing at times.

So it may be that using the age-old tradition of British irony could make the point more clearly. It does, at any rate, make it entertaining. Here it is for your enjoyment.

A rare piece of sanity about Greece

It is not by me, but it deserves to be read by as many people as possible.
Indeed, entire generations are currently being sacrificed at the altar of ensuring Merkel a smoother election.

This is by George Stathakis, a professor of economics at the University of Crete. The original article, The Greek Issue and the Imagination of German Politicians, is actually in Greek so you may or may not want to follow the link. Here is a translation (thanks to talos at the European Tribune) of the main points.

I would just add that point 4 is true when the said economy is in depression. An economy with a debt problem but in a boom can address it. An economy in depression, with or without a debt problem, needs deficits. Depressingly, we've known that for 80 years at least, but Germany demands that you forget it.
Oh, and please remember points 1 and 3 next time you hear that Germans are sick of picking the tab. Germany has not paid a single euro, on the contrary, they greatly gained (€10 billions already in 2012, estimated to reach around 67 billions from the crisis episode -and that is with the optimistic scenarios in terms of duration of the crisis, that have consistently been met with disappointment when confronted to reality) from the lowering of their interest payments.

At Ronnie Scott's

It was our tenth anniversary last week (not wedding anniversary, there still is some time before that, but relationship anniversary), and so we went to Ronnie Scott's jazz club for the first time.

It having been the first time makes it difficult to form a general opinion, I do realise that they will not have Ron Carter with the Golden Striker Trio on stage every night, but I would struggle to come up with the appropriate adjectives.
Actually, there will be some things that will be there every night: the place itself, which was very nice. The cocktails were good, at least for this gentleman who rarely drinks cocktail (but when it's your anniversary and one is called "Ma Chérie", and you are French to boot, it would seem impolite to have anything else). And then, since we had decided to have dinner, the food was very pleasant. By the way, if that's a requirement of yours, there was a vegetarian option, in fact it's what I had, and will probably have every time as it was brilliant.

As for the music, I had already liked the supporting act (there was a late night show afterwards, but we had to go home), and then Ron Carter arrived, which sent you out of this world. There had been a double bass in the supporting act, but the sound was immediately very different. Part of it of course came from the amplification choices, but it was still remarkable to hear how different it sounded (the piano too -although it was the same piano of course). Initially I was a little surprised by the sound engineering, but quickly it was clear that it was just what was needed for this band, which blended wonderfully well. And while all three musicians had their shares of solos, they really played as a band, with incredibly good balance and understanding.

If that was a typical night, then I would say that if you like jazz, go to Ronnie Scott's, you'll greatly enjoy it. And if you don't like Jazz, go to Ronnie Scott's, and then you will.

Tuscany

I – a keen cook and keener eater- have long held the view that there is a considerable contextual element to taste. By that I do not merely mean that the table can be well dressed in a pleasant place and the food set in an attractive way, although this is nice (and something that I tend to be relatively poor at). My point is with the time and place where food is eaten.

Many people surely have experienced the delights of a local specialty that, once brought back home, simply does not have the same appeal. Examples abound –Ouzo is not the same away from the Aegean Sea, mulled beer must be had in wintery Poland, hibiscus tea feels out of place in Europe and, while whisky will be enjoyed at home, it will taste very different in a remote pub at the end of a windy trek in the Highlands.

Today in Newspeak

Reading the New Statesman correspondence section (yes, I know…), I came across a letter referring to a leader that had apparently stated that the UK needed an extra one million houses over the next five years is the level to meet present needs. The letter proceeds to explain via a small calculation that the figure is actually four millions over ten years. So far, so good (or not - I really have no idea about the actual figures, the calculation is worded in a way that might suggest that there is some confusion between yearly need and backlog, and I don’t know the source of the numbers used), I don’t mean to dispute the need for extra housing in the UK.

But the reader, after apparently making a call for a strong building program (this is about meeting present “needs”, not fanciful wishes), then adds:

“A damaged economy cannot afford to allocate such a large share of limited resources to housebuilding.”

This left me nonplussed on several levels.

Out and out competition may not be the best management technique...

Via Paul Krugman, via David Atkins, an article about how managing the Sears Group by turning it into small entities that compete against each other is driving it into the ground.

Well, the fantasies about free markets will always remain a wonder. But it's even weirder to think of that as a management technique. I mean, even if you believe that you are in the pure situation where free markets give the optimum social utility (I know, those conditions are never met. But you could believe that you are in a situation that is not far enough from the pure model that the outcome stands -and for some values of "social utility", such situations probably exist), that would not mean that the situation is optimal for the individual actors.

But, surprise, surprise, when you are a company, you are not society as a whole.

It's not the main reason why it fails abysmally of course. I'm just nonplussed because even if you accept all the religion around competition, it should still not make it a sensible management strategy. Especially in retail.

Untangling the covert lobbyists

George Monbiot again, who had previously written in detail about "think tanks", and now comes up with an edifying case.

Think tanks are anything but. I mean, they (most of them at any rate) don't do much thinking -except in terms of thinking about rhetoric. Most of the conclusions are decided in advance, to be creatively justified.
Surprise surprise, even though they do their utmost never to make their funding public, determined investigations will eventually highlight funding by the very groups that the preconceived conclusions would benefit the most.
In essence, they are Public Relations companies. But they are not forced to divulge their clients, and are given much too strong an access to the media, which makes them far more dangerous.

It's high time that they be forced to disclose their sources of funding -and even that would not be sufficient regulation of the sector.
As for me, I'm happy to disclose: so far, no funding ;-)

The Wrong State

George Monbiot has an article you should read.

It is a wonder (OK, maybe I'm using the word rhetorically) that, over the past three decades and a bit, the same political movements that have demanded that governments should get their hands out of the economy (where their involvement is crucial and can be beneficial) have been so sanguine at seeing them obtain increasing powers over their constituents, including their private lives' (where they really have no business interfering) with a total lack of accountability.

That is another way in which this is, in Monbiot's appropriate title, the wrong state. Wrong in what it does, but also in the way that, while abdicating its responsibilities where it should be the main actor, it is grabbing power where it should be absent.

Greg Mankiw at it again...

Greg Mankiw came up with a defense of the top 1% (note: I provide the link because that's the done thing. I don't actually recommend that you follow it...). Many people, such as Dean Baker, Harold Pollack, Paul Krugman and even The Economist take this apart (and this time I do recommend you follow the links), take this apart.

And yet, they are being much too kind.

Greg Mankiw has written an Economics textbook that is very well regarded, and is still the leader in the undergraduate universities market in the US (although Paul Krugman's seemed to be catching up fast). Because of that, a lot of people will like him or, at any rate, not want to appear to have too bad a word for him. Yet there is a point where this becomes enforced blindness.

A telling chart

I tend to recommend that people read what Paul Krugman posts in any case, and indeed I link to his blog, but I thought I'd highlight a graph he published recently there.



And with this incredible record (I do mean incredible. It defies belief), the powers that be keep insisting that we must do more of what they have been demanding for the past, well, 5 years.

The euro will bury us all.

Asymmetric outrage

We live in London, and since yesterday (that would be the 23d of May2013 as I type), there has been little talk but of the recent murder of a soldier in Woolwhich, by two people (OK, they are technically merely suspects at this time but stayed on the scene explaining why they had done it, don’t deny it at all, and have been videotaped. Let’s assume that they did do it).

There has been a lot of comments, too, as is always the case in those internet days. Much of it, alas, on the lines of the scandal that “such people” (clearly meaning Muslims, brown or black, or any combination of those) were in Britain, that they should all be instantly deported.

Maybe mainstream media is no longer able to moderate its own forums (but then what about disabling comments?), though that is an abdication of responsibility. What was in the reports themselves was a deluge of claims that the deceased was an absolute hero (indeed he was sporting a jumper calling for “support for heroes”), and about the savagery of the attacks.

When you thought you'd hit bottom...

(As a side note, this is the problem with not having enough time. I caught up on that story very early, and wrote most of that –but was offline. By now, it’s done the rounds and more. Still, here’s another take)

Oh my! 

Regular readers (yes, you two, I’m talking to you) will remember that I wrote an article (What happened to the scientific process?) expressing some dismay regarding what can apparently be published these days, even when failing the simplest rules of data analysis, the kind that you learn in a two day course if you work in a lowish operational job.

OK, maybe I should have rephrased that as “what can apparently be published when it happens to suit what the powerful want to read”, but that would have been a stronger statement, and all I was concerned was the (very) poor quality of the analysis.

Still, it seems that this was small fry. Those who follow macroeconomics at all –or who follow politics beyond poll-tracking- will probably have heard, either of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, or at any rate will have heard of one of their results, even if they were not named (despite being highly controversial in Academic circles, it has been treated as consensual by the mainstream media, aka Very Serious People, who say things like “90% of GDP, the level of debt that economist recognise as strongly hampering econoc prospects”).

Actually, since I’ve also been posting about chess, some people have heard of them even without following economics or politics at all: Kenneth Rogoff is a chess grandmaster, and articles about him, and his research, have been published in chess media.

Some thoughts about actuarial training

Having decided that the best way to use time between project (yes, it's a smoother way to say that you are without one for the moment -well, I reckon it's rather likely that there will be one down the line, so it's probably accurate too) was to get new qualifications, I have decided that I would take the actuarial exams. They seem to be quite in demand, and I have the impression that they are close enough from my skillset that I should be able to graduate comparatively fast (it typically takes a lot of time and effort).

But even if you feel that you understand most of a subject, it's wise to do quite a bit more if you are going to take an exam, especially if you have learnt about it in a different language -I'd look rather silly if I failed to understand a question.
So, I've started reading course material -there is a lot to read. I even read the bit about how to use this material. They say you should read it with a critical mind and question what you are reading.

Good. Not that I would normally need much encouragement for that kind of thing, but good to see it encouraged.

The lie-enforcing brigade

One of those times of year has just past –by which I mean one of those times when, if you don’t openly lie to children, you get told off.

You see, no-one will see any problem in telling my sons, indeed insisting that it is so if they say something implying otherwise, that Christmas presents are brought by a fat man wearing Coca-Cola red clothes, and that Easter chocolate has been dropped by flying bells (for you English readers: my understanding is that you get told it’s done by a rabbit, which is marginally more plausible actually. In France, it’s the bells that flew all the way to Rome on good Friday, not a place particularly known for its chocolate production but never mind, where they filled up and, on their way back to the local church where they will ring again on Easter day, dropped their goodies. That the bells are, though silent, clearly visible in many a church tower during the interval is apparently not something that one is encouraged to enquire about).

At the Candidates' tournament

London is on the radar for chess players at the moment. The Candidates tournament for the world championship title is going on.

We live in London. We met through chess (yes, I'll probably have to write about who "we" is and how all of that happened one day). So we went.

Now, a cynical view could be that the very same commentary was available on the web, at the same time (maybe with a short delay to prevent cheating, but I haven't noticed that, I think it really is live, which it should not be). For free. And then we would be able to see the games displayed on a much clearer board than the horrendous graphics that the organisers, for some reasons, apparently chose. Plus, we would actually have had a better broadcast -the transmission kept failing in the hall.

So why will we be returning next Wednesday?

Well, one could argue that walking past some of the players just before or just after the game, adds to it. Or coming across the lovely press officer Anastasiya Karlovich, for the male spectators (a huge majority). But I don't think that they are major factors.

One reason may be -and that would of course be totally anathema to an economist- that while you attend, you stop yourself from doing anything else. Yes, you are in essence paying to get rid of other opportunities. And are thus totally immersed into it. This could seem paradoxical but was mentioned as a great thing by our friend Simon, who went with us. Theoretically, you could do it at home. But then you may look at the computer evaluation, you may read an email, you may lose track at some point... There, it's a total immersion, trying to find the moves yourself, which is nice when you actually do (I found that I often did find the moves in the two games I was mostly following, but in the case of Gelfand-Ivanchuk, while I did find them I had very little idea of who was better. So I would not have known how to answer a draw offer by either side. It ended in a very exciting draw by perpetual check).
It was nice to go as a group as well. Although one of us had some difficulties in keeping his comments to an inaudible whisper.

I must add that, from where we were sitting, Vassily Ivanchuk, who walks a lot between moves, tended to follow a path that led him to, apparently, look straight into my eyes before turning again. Just looking into those eyes, with this player who is notoriously removed from the present (oh, that's a guy who would like the title of this blog), with his tilted head and probably seeing something else than the few spectators that were actually in front of him, well, it felt oddly emotional.
He always tries to make things interesting and was coming off two consecutive losses. Then again he had been very creative and adventurous, and he appeared so human, so likeable, there was like an urge of jumping on the stage and giving him a hug. This is not something you'd feel in an internet broadcast.

We then all went home for dinner, which was followed by paired blitz games (one board, four players, both teams take turn playing the moves and are not allowed to confer, although banter is encouraged). Both our guests commented separately that it had been the best day they could remember in months if not more.
Yet it all came from paying to restrict our opportunities. Man is surely not a "rational" creature.

In a training for the week...

... normal life should (hopefully) resume shortly.

What happened to the scientific process?

David Greenlaw, James Hamilton, Peter Hooper, and Rick Mishkin (no, those names did not mean much to me either) have published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal based on their recent paper on debts, deficits and borrowing interest rates.

Thus far, the sentence reveals nothing extraordinary. What they end up concluding (the most policy-absorbed might have surmised it from where their op-ed was published) was that there was a strong relationship between debt level and interest rates. There is a detailed takedown of the conclusions by Matt O'Brien, so I'll focus on something else. The data they based their conclusion on can be plotted on a graph easily enough, like that:

Wealth inequality in America

Mostly as a note to myself so I know where to find it, this video is doing the rounds at the moment.

What school will my sons know?

I am a great believer in caring for things that matter, whether or not they directly affect you.
But I would not be human if being the father of two young boys, one of them due to go to school in England as of next September, did not make it feel worse.

This is from George Monbiot - I'll just reproduce the first few lines, but you should read it on his site.

A Capitalist Command Economy

Forcing schools into the hands of unelected oligarchs is the latest contradiction of everything the market fetishists claim to stand for.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 5th March 2013

So much for all those treasured Tory principles. Choice, freedom, competition, austerity: as soon as they conflict with the demands of the corporate elite, they drift into the blue yonder like thistledown.

This is a story about England’s schools, but it could just as well describe the razing of state provision throughout the world. In the name of freedom, public assets are being forcibly removed from popular control and handed to unelected oligarchs.
[...]

Scary. And, as usual with Monbiot, very well documented.

A heterodox proposal

I've been thinking about regulatory environments lately -finance, insurance, but also medical or IT.

Actually the last two will be relevant to the idea only as illustration. The proposal is about the financial world.

So, as you may or may not know, norms like Basel (2 or 3 at any rate) or Solvency 2 will require a lesser quantity of capital set aside if you have an internal process to evaluate counterparty risk. This process must be pretty thoroughly documented and will be subjected to audits.
As you also know, audit firms are paid by the company that they are auditing. Thus creating the mother of all conflicts of interest.

But how systematically relevant (aka too big to fail) institutions evaluate their risk should be of concern to all. Just like we need to make public (Ben Goldacre in Bad Pharma explains it better and more thoroughly than I could try to do, but the idea should be pretty clear anyway) all about how a pharmaceutical company conducted a trial in order that possible mistakes are detected quickly, and indeed regulation demands that this be the case.
Yes, I know, he also demonstrates vividly that the application of such regulation is appalling, and that's something that needs to be changed, but the principle stands.

You probably see where I'm going. Why not demand that institutions that adopt the internal process (in order to reduce their need for capital) disclose it fully?
They might kick and scream, but at least the enforcement would be easy: if you don't do it, your capital request is instantly doubled. Plus, it may actually reduce their costs in the long run -things will not have to be reinvented everywhere. And it would give academics the possibility to conduct large meta-studies that would help us have a much better idea of the likelihood of rare risks.

When trotting out the idea I was told that they (in that case they meant insurers -I was talking to an actuary) spend a lot in that and want to keep it a differentiating factor. Well, you may want to allow for some patenting of truly innovative practices if that's needed. Again, enforcement would be trivial since companies would have to fully disclose what they are doing (nobody, and I mean nobody, would have an internal process and not say it, since it would be a pure waste of money: you wouldn't get the reduction in required capital).

So, what do you think? It's systematically relevant to everyone. Should this data not be more than open-source code than the secret formula they currently are?

(and while you're at it, please enforce the full disclosure of pharmaceutical and agribusiness data).

Theoreticians or empiricists?

Martin Wolf and Simon Wren-Lewis have recently mentioned the distinction between engineers and theoreticians as a metaphor for how economics should be done. It is an important, and interesting, distinction, which got me thinking about my own field, and how wrongly the distinction is often perceived.

I delve into what is pompously known as Operational Excellence. Performance improvement, if you will, but not for a sportsman: for professional organisations.

In this field you frequently come across things called Lean and Six Sigma. I'm not going to explain in great detail here what they are, but if we accept a caricature, you could say that Six Sigma describes a project-based approach to situation where you first go through a data collection phase before isolating the problem, fixing it and sustaining the improvement, whereas Lean will give you a set of principles to apply in all situations and instruct to treat any deviation (aka problem) immediately.

This is crude, and anyway much of the use of experience in the field serves to know what of either approach to use when and how, but that will do for what I'll try to describe.

In applying for projects, or in training, I often get to describe how I would start by a diagnosis involving collecting data (which can be from a database, or by direct observations, or by collecting verbatims...), and then how the project will follow depending on what was identified. In short, a methodological framework.

Well, of course, you win some and lose some, actually I can't complain about my winning ratio so far. But when I've lost (and even sometimes despite having won), I've often been described as being seen as theoretical when the alternative felt more practical.

Now this has always baffled me. By training, I'm an engineer, a very practical trade. And I really don't believe I've ever had a clear idea of how something should work before studying it -on occasions I did not have any idea how it worked at all. But that's the point of having a framework to study things.
I believe that I am an empiricist -which is why I so need data to make up my mind. And this was confirmed when I was able to get a hint of what the alternative, the one deemed practical, had suggested.

Some thoughts about triangulation

Read in a comment on the European Tribune:

" To get elected, you want to collect everybody on your wing (left wing, if you're a Democrat), and as many nearer the center as possible. Your opponent does the opposite.
Each of you maximizes his electoral position by moving as close to the center as possible, to avoid losing a small percentage of centrist voters. So even if you are a flaming communist, or a full-fledged nazi, you will come to the center to try to get elected."

Several things there.

First, to the extent that it would be true, it would be a damning indictment against any two-parties system. If elections were to then be fought on totally spurious -and essentially identical- programs, bearing no resemblance to the actual agenda (that would be much less consensual), simply because you'd be trying to stop your opponent from winning the centre, then there would be no possibility of something approaching a reasonable democratic choice.
I'm not saying that there is a reasonable democratic choice at this stage, yet I get the impression that pretending to be centrist is not always the strategy on display.

The disaster of axiomatic macroeconomic thinking

This is something I published recently on the European Tribune

On Friday (22nd February), Moody's downgraded the UK's credit rating by a notch. That is actually a non-event. Rating agencies clearly play to an ideological agenda (for instance, they consistently give a higher rating to a private company than to a state for a similar level of risk), and it's hard to see in what circumstances the UK, a country with its own central bank emitting fiat money, could default.
What makes it somewhat more interesting is that UK's chancellor, George Osborne, reacted that way :

"Tonight we have a stark reminder of the debt problems facing our country - and the clearest possible warning to anyone who thinks we can run away from dealing with those problems," he said. "Far from weakening our resolve to deliver our economic recovery plan, this decision redoubles it.
"We will go on delivering the plan that has cut the deficit by a quarter, and given us record low interest rates and record numbers of jobs."
[...]
"As the rating agency says, Britain faces huge challenges at home from the debts built up over many, many years, and it is made no easier by the very weak economic situation in Europe.
"Crucially for families and businesses, they say that 'the UK's creditworthiness remains extremely high' thanks in part to a 'strong track record of fiscal consolidation' and our 'political will'.
[...]
"They also make it absolutely clear that they could downgrade the UK's credit rating further in the event of 'reduced political commitment to fiscal consolidation'.
"We are not going to run away from our problems, we are going to overcome them."

---

Now, this got some reactions. Paul Krugman, Mark Thoma, Simon Wren-Lewis(and many others I'm sure) quickly wrote about this, and made very good, and damning, points. What I would like to focus on is the fact that this could even be said, the assumptions (spoken or unspoken) that Osborne's statement carried with it. Incredibly, they are by many not seen as assumptions, or points of contention, or even hard-acquired knowledge. Rather, they are there as undisputable facts of life that everyone knows. I will list the ones that come to me, but will surely miss some that you may want to add.

Welcome all

Hello everyone!

To be fair, this is mostly a test at this stage. It will probably take me a little while to work you what I can do and how, but I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.

Anyway, if you're reading this, welcome to Anachronicles.

It's in English though I'm French because I have noticed that many more of the French speakers I know speak English than English speakers speak French. But there may be a few posts in French, so those French classes in high school could come in handy after all.

As for the name, well... 
I quite frequently feel out of synch with our times on many a thing. And since I don't pretend to have invented all that much, then one could venture that my emotions would be more in synch, on that issue, with some other times, past or future (yes, I know we can't know the future, but for instance one could argue that the suffragettes were more in synch with the future on their favourite topic). Hence the anachronism. And since by essence a blog is constructed as chronicles, well, there we are.

By the way, a feeling of gap with the times should never morph into the illusion of there having ever been an ideal times to which we should revert. We are probably more attuned to different epochs for different subjects. One can be greatly influenced by fourth century Athens while remembering that they had slaves (I'm assuming my readers will agree that this was a negative. Corporate overlords may beg to differ); one can like the increase class solidarity in the West in the aftermath of the second world war, while remembering that at the time, the trees of the south still bore strange fruit.
This is about the beats that our times miss, not about the idealisation of a mythical past.