From one of the founders of modern economics. From p.114 in the physical book (1895) which I'm sure the library shouldn't let me take out - it's an antique! It's got errata pasted in by hand. Online here. The first three paras are quite dry, but give a good outline of the full meaning of 'general' analysis in economics. As far as I can tell, we're some way from knowing all the answers, especially as regards the general effect of - say - energy cost changes. It picks up at para four, 'How should we act so as to increase the good and diminish the evil influences of economic freedom?' Later, 'taking it for granted that a more equal distribution of wealth is to be desired...', ho ho, how quaint!

A commenter over at Tamino's blog puts in a good word for economists:

How would you physicists like it if you had to survey a bunch of molecules to find out what they planned to do, only to have most of them change their minds anyway, and the government restructure the laws of physics because of some opinion poll?

I caught a programme last night on the beeb about property. Nothing new there - you can be guaranteed to find a property programme of some description 50% of the time the telly goes on: if the schedulers are to be believed, we're obsessed. (Indeed, there was another property prog on Channel 4 at the same time.)

But this one was a little more thoughtful. The last person to be interviewed was an estate agent based in Sandbanks, Poole - not too far away from where I used to live in Bournemouth. A few years back, one place sold for a particularly large amount of money, and worked out at something like £900 per square foot. This particular estate agent did a quick calculation and discovered this made it the fourth most expensive place to live in the world. The next step is brilliant: he then trumpeted the whole area as such. 'Sandbanks: the fourth most expensive place to live in the world!' Thus began Sandbank's insane rocketing into the property stratosphere, accompanied (as he notes) by developing new offices and a whole selling style suitable to people wanting to buy into the Sandbanks glow.

Over at Crooked Timber, there's a great post on the minimum wage where Kathy argues that 1) there are plenty of empirical reasons why increasing a minimum wage may not lead to higher unemployment and 2) that you'll get into trouble with the economic 'fundamentalists' if you try and work on this issue without concluding that it does.

This is probably a foolish venture (given my math ignorance) but here's some thoughts on an economic random walk. (Any pointers to elementary fuck-ups / blindingly obvious things I'm missing appreciated.) I've come across the graphs here in each of the simple models I've done of trade exchanges. This one isn't a real trade exchange - it's had price decisions removed entirely. So apart from the limit on the amount of money in the economy and the requirement that money is 'exchanged', they are random walks. It's like this. We start with:

• 100 people, 100 pounds each (so the amount of money in this 'economy' remains constant: the mean is always 100.)
• Run for 200,000 days
• On each day, each person randomly chooses someone, and gives them a pound if they have a pound to give. If they don't, on to the next person's random choice.

(See links below for graphs and code.)