Marc Preel’s AFP article doesn’t say anything particularly surprising about one of the consequences of Iceland’s spectacular economic collapse.Anna Margret Bjoernsdottir never thought she would be forced to leave her once wealthy homeland, but after 18 months of economic upheaval she has decided to join the biggest emigration wave from Iceland in more than a century.”I just don’t see any future

Read the rest here: 
On the new wave of Icelandic emigrants

If you examine this chart of US birthrates created by Calculated Risk based on data from the US NCHS, you should notice that there was a spike in the rate during the WWII years; it goes up between 1939 and 1943, then drops again briefly before beginning the surge frequently referred to as the “baby boom”. A lot of press and marketing have been generated hyping the “baby boom”

See original here:
Baby boom narrative flawed

Yochai Benkler of Harvard University talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about net neutrality, access to the internet, and innovation. Benkler argues in favor of net neutrality and government support of broadband access. He is skeptical of the virtues of new technology (such as the iPad) fearing that they will lead to less innovation

View post:
Benkler on Net Neutrality, Competition, and the Future of the Internet

The recent sinking of a South Korean naval vessel off the North Korean coast has once again brought the division of Korea, and North Korea’s apparent unpredictability, to the minds of many. Sublime Oblivion’s Anatoly Karlin makes the point that, in a second Korean War, North Korea would be so outclassed by South Korea and United States forces that the latter could decide the fate of North Korea

View original post here: 
On migration and population in reunification-era Korea

Arthur De Vany, of the University of California, Irvine, and creator of Evolutionary Fitness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about performance-enhancing drugs in baseball and Evolutionary Fitness, De Vany’s ideas about diet and fitness. In the first part of the conversation, De Vany argues that there is little physiological or statistical evidence that steroid use increases home run totals in baseball. The second part of the conversation turns to De Vany’s theories of diet and exercise

More: 
De Vany on Steroids, Baseball, and Evolutionary Fitness

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona When we look back five years from now, will we see this week as marking a turning point in the short, but far from uneventful, ten year history of Europe’s common currency? Certainly recent comments by the deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China have made evident what was already implicit: the dependence of EU sovereign debt on sentiment in global markets, especially in Asia and the Americas.

Read more from the original source:
From A Greek Debt Crisis To A Eurozone Structural One?

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona If you’re really good at making a pigs ear of things, why not join the EU? Of course, this is not meant as a piece of solid advice, rather it is a cry of frustration at being impotently forced to watch so many things done so badly, each in turn, and one after the other.

Read more: 
Why Not Unravel The IMF Too While We’re At It?

Steve Meyer, music industry veteran and publisher of the Disc and Dat Newsletter, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the evolution of the music industry and the impact of the digital revolution.

Read the rest here: 
Meyer on the Music Industry and the Internet

Pratap Chakravarty’s Agence France-Presse article “Gay couples find surrogate mothers in India” caught my attention.For gay U.S. businessman Brad Fister, experiencing the joy of fatherhood meant flying half way around the world to India where he first held his baby daughter, born to a woman who had signed away any right to her child.Commercial surrogacy is a booming industry in India, and in

More here: 
On assisted reproduction and its problems

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona As Irwin Stelzer argued in a recent opinion article in the Wall Street Journal , Spain’s Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero seems to be an admirer of Charles Dickens’s character Mr. Micawber. When asked what he plans to do about Spain’s 11.4% fiscal deficit, first he promises to extend the retirement age, only to later tell us the measure may not be necessary

Here is the original post:
Waiting For Something To Turn Up: Europe’s Looming Pensions-based Sovereign Debt Crisis

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona Well, I for one can’t help thinking that it’s now well time we all stopped getting carried away with the use of so many acronyms. Not only may one man’s meat easily prove to be another’s poison, it may even be that for some the entire meal will be so distasteful as to prove totally indigestable

More here:
Serious Problems Emerge For The F-UK-De Group Of Countries

Don Boudreaux of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about public choice: the application of economics to the political process. Boudreaux argues that political competition is a blunt instrument that works less effectively than economic competition

Read the rest here:
Don Boudreaux on Public Choice

The invaluable Livejournal blogger demographer was kind enough to link to an overview of the latest Goskomstat figures on Russia’s population profile. There is a lot of interesting stuff there.Russia’s population is stabilizing, largely thanks to the rate of natural decrease, well, decreasing sharply. As Scott and me noted earlier, the deficit of women of childbearing age will impact negatively

The rest is here:
"The demographic situation in Russia in 2008"

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona According to Bundesbank President Axel Weber, Germany’s economic recovery is “essentially intact” , and is now set to benefit from stronger demand in countries outside the euro region. “I firmly believe that the recovery process that began in summer 2009 is essentially intact, and that it will continue despite the slower growth dynamic in the winter semester. An additional factor in this context is that the German labor market continues to be in extremely robust shape.” What exactly it means to say that an economy is intact we will explore below, but it is clear that some confirmation for the view that the German economy is benefiting from increased demand originating outside the Eurozone can be found in the latest press release on manufacturing industry turnover from the Federal Statistics Office , where they note that while January’s manufacturing sector turnover surpassed that of January 2009 – by a working day adjusted 2.6% – domestic sales actually fell (by 1.1%), and export turnover rose by 7.3%.

See the original post: 
The German Economy Is Essentially "Intact"

Katherine Newman, Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about Newman’s case studies of fast-food workers in Harlem. Newman discusses the evolution of their careers and fortunes over time along with their dreams and successes and failures. The conversation concludes with lessons for public policy in aiding low-wage workers.

See the original post:
Newman on Low-wage Workers

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed There’s a dyin’ voice within me reaching out somewhere, …………. It’s not often that I await the ECB after-meeting press conference statements of Jean Claude Trichet with such an intense feeling of anxiety and bated breath. But this time, as the song goes, it will be different

See the original post:
Hanging In The Balance Over At The ECB

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona According to data released on Monday by the Swedish statistical office Sweden unexpectedly fell back into recession in the fourth quarter, adding to the impression there has been a growth dip among Europe’s economies and raising further questions about the durability of the recovery in Europe. Gross domestic product contracted by a seasonally adjusted 0.6 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009 (when compared with the previous three months), despite analyst expectations for growth of 0.3 per cent. In addition the third-quarter figure was revised to a 0.1 per cent quarterly decline (down from an original 0.2 per cent gain) which means that Sweden is now back in recession.

See original here:
Just What Is Going On In Sweden?

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona Global manufacturing activity continued to expand in February, albeit at a slightly weaker pace than in January.

Excerpt from: 
The "Three Speed" Global Manufacturing Recovery Continues in February

Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the history of bailouts in recent times, beginning with Lockheed and Chrysler in the 1970s and continuing through the current financial crisis. In addition to the government role in aiding ailing companies, Ritholtz also looks at the role of the Fed in discouraging prudence through its efforts to keep asset prices and the stock market at high levels. The conversation closes with a discussion of what Ritholtz has learned from the crisis.

Read the original:
Ritholtz on Bailouts, the Fed, and the Crisis

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona “Doom-mongers” – the Economist tells us – “are licking their wounds”. And why exactly are they licking their wounds? Well for two years now (apparently) they have been telling us that “the struggle to save the lat’s peg to the euro was bound to end in tears”.

See the original post here: 
Too Soon To Cry "Victory" On Latvia?

Garett Jones of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the art of communicating economics via puzzles and short provocative insights. They discuss Jones’s Twitter strategy of posting quotes and short puzzles to provoke thinking.

The rest is here: 
Garett Jones on Macro and Twitter

The Abkhaz, the titular nation of the quasi-state of Abkhazia in northwestern Georgia, contrary to popular mythology, don’t actually live to amazingly long ages. First, here’s some background about the Abkhaz, as provided in Georgi Derluguian’s “Abkhazia: A Broken Paradise”.Linguistically and anthropologically, the native Abkhazes belong to the North Caucasian group of peoples that also comprises

Read the original post:
On what the Abkhaz have to teach us about longevity

By Claus Vistesen: Copenhagen The Eurozone’s current problems are not mainly a result a of prolifigate and reckless spending of government resources in the Eurozone periphery [1]. Even nobel laureate Paul Krugman has begun to forcefully push this argument arguing that the real source of the malaise is the steady build up internal Eurozone imbalances.

More here: 
Drawing the Right Lessons from an Obscure tale of Obscure Interest rate Swaps

The Canadian province of Ontario is easily the most populous province in Canada, with a population that’s more than half again larger than the runner-up province, Québec. Ontario has long been a net receiver of migrants, firstly from the rest of the country then internationally. This, has helped keep Ontario’s population young relative to the Canadian average.Canada’s most populous province is

The rest is here:
On the inconveniences of Ontario having high structural unemployment and rapid aging

by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera, Puerto Rico It’s official now: Ukraine’s former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, the leader of the pro-Russian Party of Regions, was declared elected President by the former Soviet republic’s Central Election Commission on Sunday. Yanukovych prevailed over Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko by a relatively narrow but nonetheless clear margin of just under three-and-a-half percentage points in a runoff election held last February 7; detailed results are available in Ukrainian at the Commission’s website and in English at Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Ukraine

See original here: 
Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election: another power struggle to follow?