Kindle Edition Best Seller

The book, Getting It Wrong, now is available from Amazon as a Kindle Edition, and already is on the Kindle bestsellers lists for both Econometrics and for Money and Monetary Policy.

Short Review of Getting It Wrong

A short one-paragraph commentary on the book, Getting It Wrong, just appeared in The Economist Intelligence Unit, which is associated with the Economist magazine.

A Rant on The Money Illusion Blog

A January 6 rant on The Money Illusion blog referred to "Paul Spindt’s debit weighted money figures." But Paul Spindt's MQ index uses turnover rates (not debits) as prices (not weights). My Divisia monetary aggregates use opportunity costs (foregone interests) to measure prices of monetary assets.

I am not aware of a current source of MQ data, and they will not be computed or supplied by the CFS. But if you are interested in MQ, you can read about it on pp. 212-213 of my new book, Getting It Wrong.

Prices versus Share Weights

I just posted this on The Money Illusion blog. As you may have noticed in the latest issue of the Economist Magazine, The Money Illusion blog is highly respected.

Glad to see there is interest on this eminent blog about what I’m doing at the Center for Financial Stability (CFS) in NY City. That said, I probably should mention that interpretation of Divisia money is more difficult than it may seem. In index number theory, there are quantities, prices, and weights. With Divisia, the growth rate weights are the expenditure shares, which depend upon all quantities and prices, not just one price. The prices and the weights are not the same thing. With the Divisia monetary aggregates, the prices are foregone interest (opportunity costs). Those prices are not the same as the weights, but often are misinterpreted as weights.

Consider, for example, the case of a Cobb-Douglas aggregator function. The expenditure shares are constants for Cobb-Douglas. Regardless of what happens to the prices, the shares will not change. Hence the Divisia weights will not change.

What about other aggregator functions, not Cobb-Douglas? Suppose the price of a good goes up. Will its share (and thereby its Divisia weight) go up? That’s unpredictable, since it depends upon whether the own price elasticity of demand of the good is greater than or less than 1.0.

The CFS Reports section, which is not yet online, will try to help with accurate interpretation. My new book also does that in Appendix E. Once you get the hang of it, it all becomes clear. It’s all about the microeconomic aggregation theory that we all know from the CPI, the National Accounts, etc.

My Reply

Regarding the insightful commentaries that just appeared on the three blogs, The Money Illusion, The Market Monetarist, and Monetary Freedom, I just posted the following reply on the Monetary Freedom blog.

All very interesting. The relevant theory is in the appendixes to my new book, Getting It Wrong. The source of the new Divisia data is the program I now direct at the Center for Financial Stability in NY City. The program is called Advances in Monetary and Financial Measurement (AMFM).

AMFM will include a Reports section discussing monetary conditions. Although not yet online, that section will address many of the concerns rightfully appearing in the excellent blogs, The Money Illusion, The Market Monetarist, and Monetary Freedom. The distinction between the AMFM Reports section and the AMFM Library, which is already online, is that the AMFM Library only relates to articles published in peer-reviewed journals and books, while the AMFM Reports section will relate to the public media and online blogs.

There will be a press release when the full AMFM site is ready to go online.

Blog Posts About Getting It Wrong

Blog posts and discussion of my new book, Getting It Wrong, just appeared in three widely read economics blogs: The Money Illusion, The Market Monetarist, and Monetary Freedom.

Marginal Revolution Recommendation

My book, Getting It Wrong, is on the Marginal Revolution blog's list of recommended books.

Endorsements for Getting It Wrong

Endorsement quotations for the new book, Getting It Wrong, are online at the Center for Financial Stability.

Globe Asia Review, December 2011

A very interesting article by Steve Hanke appeared in the December issue of Globe Asia and highlighted recent behavior of Divisia M4.

Complete Front and Back Cover of New Book, Getting It Wrong

Here is the full front and back covers of the new book, Getting It Wrong, from MIT Press. Click on it to expand the view.

Front Cover, Getting It Wrong

Here is the front cover of the new book, Getting It Wrong, from MIT Press. Click on it to expand the view.

Book Can Be Ordered Now

My new book, Getting It Wrong, is available for advance orders at Amazon. Although not expected to be in bookstores until late December, both the paperback and hardcover editions can be preordered now from Amazon.

The book also is available for preorder directly from MIT Press. The MIT listings for the paperback and hardcover say that they are to appear in February 2012, but that is wrong. The book is to appear in December, but may not be widely available on bookstore shelves until February.

Review of Getting It Wrong

An article about Getting It Wrong just appeared in the Energy Tribune. The review is by Steve Hanke at Johns Hopkins University. The same article also is online at the Cato Institute and appeared in the November 2011 issue of Globe Asia.

Getting It Wrong

My book, Getting It Wrong, will be published by MIT Press in December. The book's promotional material from MIT Press is online at the Center for Financial Stability.

Center for Financial Stability

The program I direct at the Center for Financial Stability (CFS) has just gone online. The full program will be live by the end of this year. The CFS is located on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City about three blocks from Rockefeller Center.

Valor Economico

I did not get to the Rio conference. Flight canceled at DFW airport, because of tornado. But I got written up anyway by Valor Economico, which is the Wall Street Journal of Brazil. I've put online the pdf of the newspaper's article from both the online edition and in-print edition.

New Book

A related newer book has just been published. It is:

William A. Barnett and Marcelle Chauvet (eds.), Financial Aggregation and Index Number Theory, World Scientific, Singapore, ISBN 9814293091, 2011.

Golden Book

An excellent book review of ITEM appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature in the June 2008, vol 46, no 2, issue on pp. 418-421. It starts as follows:

"We economists have long been inured to the fact that anything touched by Paul Samuelson at once turns to gold. And, unlike the ancient legend, this bit of alchemy is a benefit to us all. As far as I am aware, this book is a new line of enterprise for him, since I do not know of any other collection of interviews that he has overseen. In any event, this book makes for reading that is both interesting and illuminating. In short, it is literally a volume of edited interviews with a well chosen set of leaders in our field, conducted from the mid 1990s onward, and a number of which have previously appeared in the journal Macroeconomic Dynamics."

The review ends as follows:

"I must end as I began—this is a book well worth reading. It has considerable information of substance, valuable insights and just enough gossip to ensure that it is rewarding and enjoyable to the reader."

Between the first and last paragraphs are many insightful comments on the interviews in the book.

Very High Ranked Blog & Bloggers

In their recent article, "Blogometrics," in the Eastern Economic Journal (vol 28, 2010, pp. 1 - 10), Franklin Mixon, Jr. and Kamal Upadhyaya rank economics blogs, bloggers, and academic institutions that host blogs. Instead of going to the complete article, you can go directly to Table 1 and Table 2. The results of that study also have been summarized in the TaxProf blog.

According to the "Blogometrics" rankings, this ITEM blog ranks fourth among all economics blogs (table 2). The study also found that Paul Samuelson ranks fifth for his own scholarly impact and William Barnett fourteenth for his own scholarly impact (table 1). The ranking of the bloggers "was done through the Harzing database of citations to scholarly articles, books, and popular press essays authored by economist bloggers. For this study, economics bloggers are ranked based on citations per year."

In Table 3, the study ranks institutions, based on the impact of blogs that they host. The University of Kansas and MIT ranked as tied for sixth.

Wiley Preview of ITEM

Wiley now has a preview of the book online.

Sad News

The following sad news just appeared on economicprincipals.com:

"Paul A. Samuelson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died peacefully this morning of congestive heart failure. He was 94. John Maynard Keynes may have had more influence on policy makers, Milton Friedman on citizens, Kenneth Arrow on economic theory, but Samuelson had more influence on the way economics is done today, and the purposes to which it is put, than any other economist of the twentieth century."

German Edition of ITEM

The German edition of Inside the Economist's Mind has just been published by Wiley-VCH. Here is the information from its online catalog:

Samuelson, Paul A. / Barnett, William A. (Hrsg.)
Große Ökonomen im persönlichen Gespräch
Wie Volkswirtschaftslehre Geschichte schreibt

1. Auflage - Dezember 2009
29,90 Euro
2009. 310 Seiten, Hardcover
- Fachbuch -
ISBN-10: 3-527-50444-3
ISBN-13: 978-3-527-50444-2 - Wiley-VCH, Weinheim

Preis inkl. Mehrwertsteuer zzgl. Versandkosten.

Australian Bookstore

If you are in Australia and are interested in ITEM, I recommend Boomerang books.

Pirated Book

I see that the book, ITEM, is online at scribd. I understand that this is a violation of Wiley's copyright. I assume scribd will be removing it soon, as is now being required by Wiley's attorney.

German Edition

The German edition of ITEM now is available to be advance ordered from Wiley, but Wiley will not begin delivering the German copies until December 2009.

Adam Smith Blog

The following comment just appeared in the blog, Adam Smith's Lost Legacy:

The reputation of Paul Samuelson, from the start of his illustrious academic career, and the publication of his Phd dissertation, Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947), is enormous. His popular textbook, Economics, was used to teach, literally, tens of thousands of post-war students, and even his latest writings on his profession (e.g., Inside the economist's mind: conversations with eminent economists‎, 2007) show why his reputation is so high.

Foreword to Russian Translation of ITEM

A foreword was added to the Russian translation of ITEM. That foreword was written by the Rector of the SKOLKOVO School of Management in Moscow. I've had it translated into English and put online.

ITEM Translated into Russian

The book, Inside the Economist's Mind, now has been translated into Russian. The ISBN of the Russian translation is 978-5-9614-0793-8. The Editor of the translated edition is O. Nizhelskaya. The translators are E. Pestereva and E. Kalugin. The book is within the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO series, published by Alpina Business Books, Moscow, in December 2008. The SKOLKOVO series' ISBN number is 978-5-9614-0633-7.

A Blog Post in Nepal

An interesting post about ITEM appeared yesterday (January 8, 2009) on a blog in Nepal.

A Principles Course Syllabus

I have found an interesting course syllabus online for a principles of macroeconomics course being taught at a community college in Los Angeles. The course uses ITEM as supplementary reading for a required essay. The regular text for the course is Greg Mankiw's principles book.

Wiley Takes Over

Although the book, ITEM, originally was published by Blackwell, the takeover of Blackwell by Wiley has resulted in the move of the publisher's site for the book to Wiley's site. Wiley now has pages both for the paperback and for the hardcover editions.

Russian Translation

The Russian translation of the book, ITEM, is now at the printers and will be published and available for sale from its Russian publisher, Alpina, in mid-December.

Chinese Translation

I have just been informed that the book, ITEM, has been translated into Simplified Chinese and has been available from Peking University Press in Beijing, China since October 1, 2008. The translator is Cao Heping.

The book title in Chinese is "经济学家之经济学家" with an ISBN no. of 978-7-301-14225-7 and can be ordered through Amazon's Chinese site (www.amazon.com.cn) or a Chinese online bookseller called 当当网(www.dangdang.com) or www.zhuoyue.com. The book also is in many bookstores in China, including Xidan Bookmall and Peking University Bookstore in Beijing.

Why Did the Bubble Burst?

My own Guest Commentary on the current financial crisis appeared in the November 11, 2008 edition of the Kansas City Star Business Weekly. The unedited original, including the Federal Reserve charts that support it, are online as a working paper.

James Hamilton's Review

James Hamilton's review of ITEM is online in EconPapers. The review was published in the Cambridge U. Press journal, Macroeconomic Dynamics.

IMF Review

A review of ITEM just appeared on the IMF (International Monetary Fund) web site.

German Translation

I have been informed that a German translation of ITEM is to be published by Wiley VCH.

Economic and Political Weekly Review

A book review of ITEM has appeared in the July 19 - 25, 2008 issue of the highly regarded Indian journal, Economic and Political Weekly. The review begins with:

"This book can make you fall in love with economics all over again. A collection of interviews with 16 eminent economists, it presents the attractive face of the field – one rediscovers an economics concerned with improving the human condition by putting to good use tools borrowed from disciplines as diverse as mathematics and psychology. The book is a labour of love for William Barnett, the editor of the journal Macroeconomic Dynamics in which these interviews originally appeared between 1997 and 2005. Though the interviews were aimed at professional macroeconomists, much of the book is of broader interest. That is because these eminent economists, interviewed by their peers, are often able to describe their complicated work in simple terms, with modesty and humour, and enriched with anecdotes from their lives."

The author of the four page review was Prakash Loungani, Advisor, Research Department, International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC.

Russian Translation

Evidently ITEM's translation into Russian is soon to be available. See Russian School of Management SKOLKOV.

If you look at that site, you will find the following statement:

" The SKOLKOVO publishing series is opened by books of world-renowned authors:

- 'Essential Writings on Management' Peter Drucker;
- 'The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do' Clotaire Rapaille;
- 'Hostage at the Table: How Leaders Can Overcome Conflict, Influence Others, and Raise Performance' George Kohlrieser;
- 'The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World' Alan Greenspan;
- 'Inside the Economist's Mind', edited by Paul Samuelson and William Barnett)."

You can also find the following there:

"Being realized in partnership with the government of the Russian Federation, SKOLKOVO is a part of the national priority projects programme, funded exclusively by private business. Dmitry Medvedev, the President of the Russian Federation, is the Chairman of the SKOLKOVO International Advisory Board."

The Housing Bubble

An excerpt from Vockler's interview in ITEM appeared in Dirk Ehnts' blog, econ101.de. Dirk relates the excerpt to the failure of Central Bank regulation of lending practices associated with the housing bubble. Indeed Volcker was clear in his interview about the risks of inadequate supervision and regulation by central banks.

Korean Translation of ITEM

The book has been translated into Korean and published on March 27, 2008. The publisher is JISIK-SANUP Publishing Co.Ltd. in Seoul. The translators are Jeong Ho Hahm and Tae Hong Jinn. Many book reviews have appeared in the Korean press. I understand that 10 such reviews have already appeared, including reviews in the Maekyung Business Newspaper, Munhwa Ilbo Daily Newspaper, Financial News in Korea, and the "big three" Korean newspapers, Chosun Ilbo Daily Newspaper in the April 12, 2008 Saturday culture section, Donga on April 1, 2008, and JoongAng Daily Newspaper on April 12, 2008. None of those reviews have been translated into English, but the Chosun Ilbo review also is online (in Korean) in the newspaper's own web site.

Economic History Review

A book review of ITEM appeared in the journal, Economic History Review, vol 60, no 4, 2007, pp. 869-871. It was written by Roger Middleton himself. He is the Book Review Editor of that journal. Among the statements in the review is: "All of the interviews first appeared in the journal Macroeconomic Dynamics, of which Barnett is the editor, and, uniquely for a leading peer-reviewed academic economics journal, all were given significant space and free licence to say what they wanted about economists and economics to their peers. The end result is a most welcome addition to the genre in which leading economists outline their life philosophies and reflect candidly on the evolution of modern economics. Moreover, whilst not all of the interviewees took advantage of the licence to offend, those that did will not disappoint, and the reader is directed to pp. 44–5 on how to respond when your head of department tells you that you are a luxury good."

Google Books Preview

The Google Books preview of ITEM has improved dramatically since it first appeared in January of 2007. I don't know how they manage to do this, but Google Books has gotten together a lot of relevant information about the book.

Wiley Takeover of Blackwell

Since Wiley has taken over and absorbed Blackwell, ITEM now is published by Wiley. Although the Blackwell site still exists, it is gradually being fazed out. ITEM now is in the Wiley site for both the paperback and the hardcover.

Amazon Reviews

Amazon.com has a new site for reviews. ITEM is reviewed as 5 stars out of a possible 5.

Economics Roundtable Book Picks

The highly regarded Economics Roundtable blog, hosted by William Park at the University of North Carolina, has posted its six recommended book picks. ITEM is among the six. This puts ITEM in very good company indeed, including two classics. The other five are:

1. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, Monetary History of the United States.
2. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
3. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics.
4. Gregory Mankew, Principles of Economics.
5. David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.

Economists who Love to Fish

Interesting photos from ITEM in the August 25, 2007 "The Bayesian Heresy" blog.

London Times Supplement

Choice Picks

Each month, the editors of Choice magazine publish online the reviews they decide to highlight as "Editors' Picks." ITEM was a "highly recommended" Editors' Pick for June 2007.

Choice Magazine Review

The following review appears in the June 2007 issue of Choice Magazine:

Social & Behavioral Sciences \ Economics

Inside the economist's mind: conversations with eminent economists , ed. by Paul A. Samuelson and William A. Barnett. Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 419p afp ISBN 1405159170 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9781405159173 pbk, $29.95. Reviewed in 2007jun CHOICE.

Inside the Economist's Mind offers 16 stand-alone, candid personal interviews with some of the world's best economists, conducted by other leading economists. A far cry from Matt Lauer talking with Tom Cruise on The Today Show, these 25-page conversations quickly hone in on what makes these leading economists from the academic world and public policy corridors tick, and how they--and the profession itself--evolved in research and thinking. These chapters originally appeared in an academic journal (Macroeconomic Dynamics, various issues, 1998-2005), and the exchanges are pitched at a fairly sophisticated level and tilt toward macroeconomic theory and policy matters. Some knowledge about and appreciation for higher economic analysis should be expected from readers; such readers have the most to gain from the book. But the people and the personalities show through in this superb collection of "economists' economists," or more specifically, the "old guard"--all are over 60; a companion volume on the "young and the restless" would make a nice complement. Bibliographic materials--references, appendixes, index--are not necessary or included in the volume. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Informed general readers; students, lower-division undergraduate and up; researchers and practitioners. -- A. R. Sanderson, University of Chicago