And the winner is......

Cameron T. Morris for his work on estimating the effects that legalizing the coca leaf in Bolivia have on personal and national savings. Well, not yet. But here's the real news. From the FT

The 2006 Nobel prize for economics has been awarded to Professor Edmund Phelps of Columbia University for his work in the late 1960s overturning the conventional wisdom on the trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said it had awarded the economics prize in memory of Alfred Nobel to Prof Phelps “for his analysis of the intertemporal trade-offs in macroeconomic policy”.

Stay tuned. Look for me in 2050, if we haven't all killed ourselves by then.

The Origins of the Leisure Class

We're all doing it wrong. I'm going to stop blogging and retreat to the woods.

"Far from scrabbling endlessly and desperately for food, hunter-gatherers are among the best-fed people on earth, and they manage this with only two or three hours a day of what you would call work -- which makes them among the most leisured people on earth as well. In his book on stone age economics, Marshall Sahlins described them as 'the original affluent society'."

-Quinn, Daniel, Ishmael, pg 220

Steven Levitt, The Saga Continues, Selling Soap

Even if you are not a student of Economics, you are almost surely familiar with Steven Levitt and his book, Freakonomics. Levitt has assumed a pop star status in the Economics community over the last couple years. While he has mass appeal most of his research is controversial and is heavily criticized.

For those of you that enjoyed his book, check out his latest installment in the NY Times. In this column he discusses hospital hygiene, in particular hand washing. It is an interesting narrative starting with the identification of a problem (low hand washing rates amongst doctors) and ending with the implementation of an ingenious incentive to remedy the problem.

What I found most interesting about this article is the limited scope of the research. The research only covers one hospital, which leaves me thinking that if I go to my local hospital there is a high chance that my doctor will have filthy hands and I probably have a higher chance of contracting more germs in the doctors office than getting cured.

*Here's a video of Levitt explaining his research on crack cocaine and gangs