Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Irwin Stelzer quotes Charles Krauthammer calling Obama's dour assessment of Republicans' concern for the national interest "essentially a libel", but then Stelzer makes the same dour assessment on his own: "A plunge off still another fiscal cliff is… unlikely…. [I]mportant Republicans, and the party’s supporters in the business community, have launched an effort to persuade the Tea Partiers and other House Republicans…. [W]hy [House Republicans] don’t understand that the nation just might be better off if this battle were concluded sooner rather than later remains a puzzle, at least to those who believe that the national interest should have some place in Republicans’ ruminations…" Does Stelzer really think that by the time his readers reach the end of his ¶4 they will have forgotten what he told them in ¶3? Or is there an esoteric Straussian teaching here--that Krauthammer is a hack--careful readers are supposed to pick up?

Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, and Andrei Shleifer: Salience and Asset Prices: "We present a simple model of asset pricing in which payoff salience drives investors' demand for risky assets. The key implication is that extreme payoffs receive disproportionate weight in the market valuation of assets. The model accounts for several puzzles in finance in an intuitive way, including preference for assets with a chance of very high payoffs, an aggregate equity premium, and countercyclical variation in stock market returns."

Ian McLean: Amazon.com: Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth

Johannes Trithemius: Steganographia and De laude scriptorum