Dirk Niepelt

SRF, October 8, 2016. Link to MP3. Excerpts from discussion about the role of the blockchain technology for central banking.

The Economist suggests that Danish Hygge (or German Gemütlichkeit) might go hand in hand with exclusion of strangers. Denmark’s own natives may rank it top for happiness, but the immigrants in the survey [among expatriates] ranked it 60th in terms of friendliness, 64th for being made to feel welcome, and 67th for the ease of finding friends. … If cultures are obsessed with the joys of relaxing with old friends, perhaps it is because they find it stressful to make new ones.

On VoxEU, Stefan Avdjiev, Robert McCauley, and Hyun Song Shin discuss how a focus on net capital flows between countries can mislead policy analysts if they neglect heterogeneity between sectors in a country and/or non-congruence of economic and currency area that is, if they assume the “triple coincidence” between economic area, decision-making unit, and currency area. The triple coincidence misleads because it obscures gross flows, … in that it gives insufficient weight to international...

Daniel Shiffman’s book The Nature of Code (posted online) provides a nice introduction to concepts such as particle systems, cellular automata, fractals, or neural networks and shows how to code them using Processing.

In the FT, Eric Platt offers an update on the debt situation in Puerto Rico: The U.S. territory carries a USD 70 billion debt burden. It has defaulted multiple times over the past year, “including on bonds backed with a constitutional guarantee.” It did not have access to a court-backed restructuring process until Congress recently passed and President Obama signed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (Promesa). A seven-person control board controls the...

15 years ago, Swissair stopped operating. Many of the fleet’s airplanes were grounded at Zurich airport. Staff and passengers could not understand the world, official Switzerland was in a state of shock, and public perceptions of UBS management which was considered to have acted in treacherous ways, started their long descend. The movie: Grounding. Werner Enz looks back in the NZZ.

On IBM Research Labs’ beautiful campus in Rüschlikon near Zurich, researchers are developing “cognitive computing” tools and applications, among others. An IBM paper written in response to a White House request for information explains: At IBM, we are guided by the term “augmented intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence.” It is the critical difference between systems that enhance and scale human expertise rather than those that attempt to replicate all of human intelligence. We...

The Economist reports about research by Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath indicating that studies in psychology, neuroscience and medicine have low statistical power (the probability to correctly reject a null hypothesis). If, nevertheless, almost all published studies contain significant results (i.e., rejections of null hypotheses), then this is suspicious. Furthermore, Smaldino and McElreath’s research suggests that the process of replication, by which published results are tested...

In a remarkable documentary about settlers in the West Bank, Shimon Dotan interviews Israeli settlers, local farmers and Israeli officials. He paints a picture of continuous clashes between fundamentalist convictions on the one hand and the rule of law on the other, with the former gaining the upper hand.

At the recent Karl Brunner Centenary event, Ernst Baltensperger characterized Monetarism as a set of five convictions: Money matters (as accepted in the neoclassical synthesis) Rules are preferred over discretion (in contrast to the views of Modigliani, Samuelson or Klein), but some flexibility is accepted Inflation and inflation expectations are key (in contrast to traditional Keynesian views)—adaptive expectation formation, parallels to Phelps Money growth targeting is useful—Brunner...