Both William Nordhaus and Paul Romer are deserving of a Nobel Prize in Economics, but I was not expecting them to win it during the same year. The Nobel committee found a way to glue them together. Nordhaus won the prize "“for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis," while Romer won the prize “for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis.” Yes, the words "climate change" and "technological innovations" might seem to suggest that they worked on different topics. But with the help of "integrating ... into long-run macroeconomic analysis," Nordhaus and Romer are now indissolubly joined as winners of the 2018 Nobel prize.
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” – Warren Buffett
The International Monetary Fund can be criticized for many things, but its analysis of countries’ debt risk tends to be worth a read.
The government of Mauricio Macri lived a week of apparent tranquillity, but the resignation of Luis Caputo as President of the Central Bank and a new IMF deal triggered the end of calm.
Brian Schmidt was a co-winner of the 2011 Nobel Physics Prize for "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." This is the discovery that leads physicists to infer the existence of "dark energy," which although we have no direct way to measure or observe it is apparently causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. At the Scientific American blog, Clara Moskowitz reports the story recently told by Schmidt about ttaking his Nobel medal to show his grandmother in Fargo, North Dakota -- a city on the eastern edge of North Dakota, on the border with my home state of Minnesota. Fargo has a little more than 100,000 people, which makes it the largest population city in North Dakota. Here's how Schmidt tells the story:
As the pedants among us never tire of pointing out, the so-called "Nobel Prize in economics" is not literally a "Nobel prize." It was not established by the original bequest from Alfred Nobel, but instead was first given in 1969, with the prize money provided by a grant from Sweden's central bank as part of the 300th anniversary of the founding of the bank. Thus, the award is officially "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel." (Justin Fox gives a nice brief overview of the history here.) Although I am pedantic in many matters, this doesn't happen to be one of them, so I will continue following the conventional usage in calling it the "Nobel prize in economics."
The black population is not equally distributed across the United States: not equally across regions of the country, nor within metropolitan areas. This unequal distribution is in substantial part a result of historical event and policy decisions, many of them rooted in racism. As a result, policies that certain regions of the country more than others, or certain parts of metropolitan areas more than others, will inevitably have disparate racial effects.