Guide to the macroeconomics of Christmas.

Lombard Street’s Dario Perkins, writing in the "You have two cows" tradition, today: (pdf)

If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three.’ As Winston Churchill noted, economists rarely agree on anything. And the topic of Christmas should be no different. Here is our guide to the macroeconomics of Christmas:

Keynesians – place a lot of emphasis on the ‘macro stabilization’ properties of Christmas. Ideally, they would vary the number of Christmases each year according to the state of the economy. This is best summarized by Paul Krugman’s depression paper ‘Wish it could be Christmas every day’, in which he also acknowledges his love of British glam rock. The Keynesians would like to see a larger role for the state, including publically-funded Santas.

Austrians – Believe Christmas is dangerous because it inevitably ends with a nasty January hangover. Also worry about the moral hazard implications of gift-giving and the propensity for overinvestment in Christmas decorations. Reject the idea of ‘public’ holidays, arguing the free market would lead to a better outcome.
( more behind the cut )

Via Izabella Kaminska at the FT Alphaville blog.

What if mathematicians wrote travel articles?

Prof. Izabella Laba posts one possible answer:

In this article we describe the plane flight that Roger and I took to San Francisco. The purpose of our trip was to meet Sergey, our collaborator on the paper “The structure of fuzzy foils” (J. Fuzzy Alg. Geom. 2003) who also co-organized with me an MSRI workshop in 2005. Our main result was to arrive at the San Francisco airport at the expected time and meet Sergey there. To accomplish this, we relied on a regularly scheduled flight on a commercial airline. For the history of aviation (including commercial aviation) and the general background, we refer the interested reader to Wikipedia (see also Britannica).

This article is organized as follows. We first explain a few preliminary steps, including the travel to the airport and the check-in procedure. The main part of the trip was the actual flight, which we discuss in a new paragraph. We conclude with a few remarks on arriving at the destination airport.

...

We are grateful to Sergey and his Awesome Leadership Grant for covering our trip expenses. We would also like to thank the anonymous referee for many valuable suggestions, including telling us not to mention that the in-flight entertainment systems was not working and so we picked our noses out of boredom. We have revised our article accordingly.