Child Labor Showdown in The Hague

I am just back from the Global Conference on Child Labor, put on in The Hague last week by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. There was a dramatic confrontation behind the scenes, and I will tell you how it went, but it won’t make any sense without a large dose of background, so bear with me.

From the standpoint of global governance, child labor falls under the aegis of the ILO and its International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC). The ILO is the UN agency that deals with labor issues, and it has a unique governance structure, with a Governing Body (like a board of directors) composed not only of government officials but also representatives of unions and employer federations. The Governing Body meets in Geneva in June and votes on international conventions written by ILO staff. These conventions are then submitted to national governments for ratification and become the legal framework for official international coordination.

There are two main conventions concerning child labor. Convention 138 sets forth the minimum age stipulations that are supposed to apply to various kinds of child labor. To be exact—and this is my own terminology—this convention defines four different sorts of activity, each with its own rules:

• Full labor market participation. This means participating in the labor market exactly as an adult; the minimum age is 18, when a person is no longer deemed a “child”.



• Restricted labor market participation. This is the same as full participation, except that work that would be especially hazardous at a younger age and work that conflicts with education are prohibited. The minimum age is 15 in developed countries, 14 in less developed countries.



• Light work. This refers to a much more modest set of activities, less demanding in time and effort; there is a lot of scope for countries to determine what it does or doesn’t allow. The minimum age is 13 for developed countries, 12 otherwise.



• Beneficial work. The convention does not restrict tasks children might perform for a few hours per week that are beneficial for them and their families (even if the kids don’t want to do it at the time). Think of washing the dishes after dinner or feeding the chickens in the back yard.

Incidentally, “work” in this context includes not only paid employment, but also unpaid but economically productive activity in the household or in family enterprises. In fact, the majority of child laborers work as members of their family, most in agriculture.

Convention 182 focuses on the worst forms of child labor (WFCL). These are divided into two groups. The “unconditional” worst forms are those that are inappropriate under all circumstances, things like prostitution, soldiering, bonded labor, and smuggling. The other category is hazardous work, which is identified at the national level and based on evidence of harmful physical or psychological impacts. Many children working in subsistence agriculture are regarded as being exposed to excessive hazards, such as dangerous equipment, chemicals, extreme temperatures, large animals and physical stress.

In its latest report, the ILO estimates that 215 million children are engaged in child labor as defined by Convention 138, and that 115 million of them are in hazardous work. There are no reliable global estimates for unconditional WFCL.

The ILO has adopted the goal, ambitious or delusional depending on your point of view, of eliminating all WFCL by the year 2016. (This is one year after the 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals, which are related but different.) Whether or not this goal is reached, it is used as a framework for mobilizing resources, fostering programs around the world and setting local targets. The Hague conference was organized as a check-in to determine the rate of progress so far and to set priorities for the next three years. There will be a follow-up conference in Brazil in 2013, a last rallying event before the 2016 target.

The main product of the conference was a roadmap document, suggesting what governments, international agencies and civil society (employers, unions and NGO’s) should be doing for the next three years. It went through several iterations, with a final negotiating session on the first night of the conference. It will be submitted to the ILO’s Governing Body next month.

That’s the background; here’s the story.

At the eleventh hour, at this final negotiating session, the US government delegation, supported by the employers, raised several fundamental objections to the proposed roadmap. In particular, they opposed any mention of Convention 138 or action against child labor in general. According to their demands, the only issue was Convention 182; we should eliminate the WFCL but sidestep the rest. They also opposed any reference to particular economic sectors like agriculture. Somehow the world is supposed to remove WFCL with a fine scalpel, leaving all other issues untouched.

The talks went on and on into the night, adjourning at 3 am. Every time the majority group (most governments, international agencies, NGO’s, unions) offered a compromise, the US team would step out into the hallway, pull out their cell phones and call Washington for instructions. The message was always the same: fight over every word, every comma. In the end, the only compromise allowed was a reference to child labor and Convention 138 in the preamble; the action items were scrubbed clean. Officially, the international community abstains from making any commitment to address child labor unless it is specifically hazardous. Half of the estimated child labor is to be eliminated, the other half ignored, at least for the next several years.

Just to be fair, the US government remains a generous donor to efforts targeting child labor—generous in the context of overall global parsimony. They provide the main external support for IPEC, and they fund a variety of important national programs in poor countries. On the other hand, it is exactly this level of funding that gives the US such an outsized ability to veto proposals at international forums: the infamous Golden Rule. (The one with the gold makes the rules.)

One small but telling irony: on the eve of the conference a rump group of academics organized by a German faction that calls itself “child labor protagonists” sent out a manifesto on the conference email list. Using militant language, they denounced efforts to eliminate child labor as elitist and ethnocentric. This is just another example of Europeans trampling other cultures underfoot, they said. Moreover, the only legitimate question is what children want. They want to work, as we know (because they are working), so let them work. The only intervention they recommend is supporting “unions” of child workers, which will supposedly lead to better and better-paid work. They called for the repeal of Convention 138 and the downsizing or elimination of IPEC. They demanded that child workers (or at least the ones affiliated with their organizations) be represented at international meetings. They should be happy at the outcome of the conference; thanks to the US government and the employers, they have made progress toward at least some of their goals.

What makes all of this such a strange spectacle is the actual situation on the ground. Suppose the primary goal is to remove 115 million children from hazardous work. That’s a lot of kids. You aren’t going to do this by creating thousands or millions of narrowly targeted intervention programs, teams of trained labor inspectors and social workers who will go out into communities and identify these children one by one. No, it is possible only by using broad spectrum methods that address non-hazardous forms of child labor as well. The most important of these is the provision of supplementary income to poor parents of school-age children. These income transfer programs, which often include requirements that children attend school or that their families take part in health and nutrition programs, have a wonderful track record of reducing child labor while also improving living standards. Everyone who studies child labor agrees on this. So what is the point of going to the mat over whether the roadmap rigorously excludes any mention of child labor that is not hazardous? That’s a real question: I’m wondering whether there is any motivation behind the US position beyond pure neoliberal ideology. (The same question could be asked of the “protagonistas”: in the end, is it all about freedom of contract in the labor market?) I don’t know the answer—I’m just asking.

Move Aside, Piven and Cloward—The New Evil Genius is Paulo Freire

Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but read this from an article about the new anti-ethnic studies bill in Arizona:

The new law, which takes effect at the end of the year, is a victory for Tom Horne, the state superintendent of public instruction, who has fought for years to end Tucson’s ethnic studies programs, which he believes teach students to feel oppressed and resent whites.

“The most offensive thing to me, fundamentally, is dividing kids by race,” Mr. Horne said.

“They are teaching a radical ideology in Raza, including that Arizona and other states were stolen from Mexico and should be given back,” he continued, referring to the Mexican-American studies classes. “My point of view is that these kids’ parents and grandparents came, mostly legally, because this is the land of opportunity, and we should teach them that if they work hard, they can accomplish anything.”

Mr. Horne, a Republican who is running for state attorney general, said he also objected to the textbook “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire.

Paulo Freire? Textbook? I’d love to see Arizona’s schoolkids try their luck with Freire’s dense left-Hegelian classic, which, by the way, deals with an entirely different set of issues.

The complete non sequitur of bringing up Freire, and the “textbook” nonsense, both suggest that Horne knows nothing at all about this topic. That in turn implies there may be a new intellectual conspiracy theory circulating among the far right. If so, get ready to hear that the triumph of secular humanism and collectivism in the indoctrination camps known as public schools all issue from this nefarious treatise by the former Brazilian theorist and activist.

I’m waiting to hear what Glenn Beck has to say about the hidden threat of “dialog”.

Mulligan On Gilligan's Island Over Housing Bubble

Casey Mulligan has gone overboard to Gilligan's Island in his latest fantasy about what happened in the housing market running up to 2006, "Was there a good reason for the housing boom?" http://caseymulligan.blogspot.com. While he admits that there might have been a little bit of a bubble, maybe, he is full of how it was mostly fundamentals. What were they? Well, the first one is that during 2002-06, people rather suddenly wanted lots more space in their housing because they were buying more stuff and wanted room to put it in. Funny about that, given how many people were buying more stuff by taking out home equity loans on the rising prices of their homes in order to buy a lot of that extra stuff.

The other is something I have not previously heard a single person mention, although in this Chicago wonderland, people do not have to know what they need to know in order to know it. In this case, it is an expectation of lower housing costs in the future due to computerization and cyberization of the mortgage lending and completion process, obviously something of great importance to people not planning to sell a home soon or buying one in that period long before these wonderful improvements would arrive (which have not yet, by and large, but we cannot disprove that this expectation was operating to push up the fundamental, can we?).

Regarding numbers, Mulligan is especially worked up about the Case and Shiller index for housing prices in major cities not having fallen all the way back to its low in 1997. It is at about 1.0 now, which it was in 1991 and 2000, with the low in 1997 around 0.8 and the high in 2006 at 1.4. If one looks at the price-to-rent ratios from around six months ago (latest I could find from Calculated Risk), http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/11/house-prices-real-prices-price-to-rent.html, one finds that as of last November this index was at about 1.10, which was what it was in 2002, peaking at just under 1.35 in 2006, with it being 100 in 1990, and somewhat under that around 1997.

Maybe there has been some upward movement of the fundamentals as measured by rents, but nowhere nearly enough to justify all the whooping that Mulligan carries on about in this piece. But what can one expect from a guy who blamed the rising unemployment as we went into the Great Recession on a sudden outbreak of laziness on the part of workers?

Feldstein v. Thoma on Fiscal Policy and Aggregate Demand

I would have thought Martin Feldstein would better understand the Barro-Ricardian Equivalence proposition:

President Obama proposes to increase tax rates on high-income households while making the existing tax rates permanent for taxpayers below the top tax brackets. While the increase would hit only a relatively small fraction of all households, that group represents a large share of total taxes and of private spending. Raising their tax rates would be a substantial blow to overall spending and therefore to GDP growth.

While it is true that high-income households represent a large share of consumption, the issue is what is the marginal propensity to consume out of a change in disposable income created by a two-year increase in current tax obligations? For households who do not face borrower constraints and would therefore most likely behave in a fashion predicted by life cycle models of consumption, the impact on consumption demand would most likely be very modest at best. The Barro-Ricardian Equivalence proposition would go so far as to suggest that delaying a tax increase needed to restore long-run fiscal sustainability would have no effect on aggregate demand.

Fortunately Mark Thoma offers us this more reasoned assessment of the role of fiscal policy and aggregate demand:

Shifting the tax cuts to people who are more likely to spend the extra money rather than put it into savings would provide an even larger boost to the economy. It's also worth noting that if the worry is about the effect on the economy and the deficit, it would also be possible to allow the tax cuts to expire and then replace the missing demand with additional temporary government spending

If Luskin is Selling Stocks – Isn’t It Time to Buy?

A friend of Brad DeLong reads the latest from Donald Luskin and then writes:

Wow! His record as a perfect contrary indicator remains untarnished!

Luskin thinks the stock market is overvalued with his “reasoning” being:

There were a lot of good reasons for stocks having risen as they did. First, we came from a terrible panic in March, 2009, when they were deeply oversold. Then as the rally progressed, it was fueled by a huge increase if corporate earnings, as the economy came out of deep recession. But all these things are cyclical. At the lows, earnings were depressed, and prices were depressed even more, so the price/earnings ratio for the S&P 500 was about 10. That's about as low as it gets. There have been times when it as lower, but that's about where it was at the worst in the Great Depression. At the highs in late April, the price/earnings ratio had risen to about 15. That's about as high as it gets. Sure, it got higher in the crazy years in the late 1990s. And there have been other exceptions. But that's about where it was at the highs in October 2007. So what we've seen was simply running from the low bound of the p/e ratio to the high bound; a classic cycle.

Price to earnings ratios of 15 are not really that high if one expects earnings growth to continue. Our chart shows US corporate profits for each quarter from 2001 to 2009. Does Donald Luskin really think that corporate profits cannot continue to grow?

"Europe Must Rewrite Social Contract As Price Of $1 Trillion Lifeline" - WaPo

Yep, there it is, the subheadline under "A new reality for the old world" for an upper left-hand corner, front page story by Howard Schneider on the front page of today's Washington Post. Wow. Except that this is one of the most distorted and off-the-wall headlines to appear in such a place in a long time, with the obvious agenda of wanting to say the same for the US (time for that deficit commission to cut social security anyone?).

What is true is that for a country (e.g only Greece so far) to borrow from the newly established fund, put up by EU countries and the IMF and backed by the ECB, with a further backing by the US Fed, which has reopened its closed-down currency swap lines, it must engage in serious budget deficit reduction. Quite likely that will involve both spending cuts and tax increases, as have been voted for now by the Greek parliament, despite the riots in the streets by opponents of this.

However, let us be clear. First of all, this is not at all a statement or policy about "Europe" as a whole at all, much less social contracts in general. As of 2006 Greece had a lower percentage of GDP going to social spending (24.2%) than the EU average (26.9%). Countries with the highest percentages include some that have much less severe budget deficit problems, e.g. Germany, Sweden, France, Austria, the Netherlands. This is a problem of tax collections and corruption and underground economies, not of an out-of-control "social contract."

European Economics at a Crossroads

I am pleased to announce the publication of my book with David Colander and Richard Holt, European Economics at a Crossroads, being issued in both hardcover and paper back simultaneously from Edward Elgar. Several years in the producing, this book is the sequel to our 2004, The Changing Face of Economics: Conversations with Cutting Edge Economists, which created a bit of a stir by arguing for the possible existence of "non-orthodox mainstream" economists, with someone like George Akerlof being an example of this peculiar breed. We also argued strongly for viewing the economics profession and intellectual development as being a complex adaptive process.

The new book continues this argument, but focuses on European economists and economics. The additional arguments involve the relationship between European economics and US economics. The former long protected many more heterodox intellectual traditions within national language traditions and publications and practices. However, this was also associated with hierarchical and stifling setups. The pressure to move to English and imitate US standards and practices, partly driven by Europeans attending US universities and returning to Europe, has both weakened these hierarchies and moved much of Europe to imitate US economics in many ways. We argue that while some of this is a good thing, there is a serious danger of imitating leftover third-rate orthodox US economics at its worst. Based on its past traditions, Europe has the opportunity to develop its own alternative and possibly superior approaches.

Following two opening chapters laying out these arguments and their connection with our earlier complexity arguments, there are a set of interviews with Alan Kirman, Ernst Fehr, Cars Hommes, Mauro Gallegati and Laura Gardini, Tonu Puu, Soren Johansen and Katarina Juselius, Geoffrey Hodgson, Joan Martinez Alier, and Robert Boyer. These are followed by two reflective interviews discussing the others and broader issues with Janos Kornai and Reinhard Selten.

Virginia AG Cuccinelli Out To Kill Academic Freedom

Friday's WaPo reports that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, following up on his efforts to end efforts by state universities and colleges to avoid discriminating against GLBT folks, has decided to interfere directly in scientific research in a criminal way, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/06/AR2010050605936.html. In particular, Cuccinelli is claiming that climate scientist, Michael Mann of hockey stick fame, engaged in billing fraud with the state while working on this subject while a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, where he has not been located for some years (now at Penn State). Cuccinelli is demanding all kinds of emails and other materials from the university, apparently attempting to imitate the climategate gang that did this over at East Anglia, only to end up with no fraud being discovered.

I think that some of the critics of Mann's work were correct, but this is an outrage. There is no evidence at all of fraud (and those claiming the email in which he spoke of using a "trick" as evidence for this do not understand or are wilfully misrepresenting how this term is used in these situations) on his part, whatever errors he may have made in his study of the hockey stick (and it really does not matter exactly what the temperature was 1000 years ago; I have posted on this here previously). As it is, Cuccinelli is trying to justify his money and time wasting lawsuit against the federal government for trying to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Maybe Cuccinelli is trying to replace Sarah Palin as the tea party's fave pol, now that she has annoyed some of them by endorsing Carly Fiorina for governor in California?

A Rant on Degrees of Violence

We live in a violent society. When people become alienated they often do violent things. When the person is "one of our own," the violence is seen as a matter of individual responsibility. A man -- Joe Stack -- becomes troubled because the financial problems and flies an airplane into an Internal Revenue Service building. The response seems to be that he is mentally unbalanced or expressing justifiable indignation in an unacceptable way.

A young Pakistani immigrant suffers financial and family problems, turns to religion, and tries to explode a car bomb in crowded Times Square. The response focuses on the religious angle because his religion is not the dominant one in the country.

What if he had used a drone instead? Obviously, most of the victims have been innocent. Of course, we have no knowledge that our own drone attacks predominately kill "guilty parties"? And then again, if the drone attack had been successfully pointed at Wall Street, it would have undoubtedly kill people whose destructive activities have resulted in many destroyed lives. Would that be justified? Our own young people who operate the drones might be seen as some as heroes.

The analogy of Wall Street and the military may be unduly provocative. And yet, the banks resemble a victorious government demanding reparations from a defeated enemy -- in this case, the losers of the class war. Why should ordinary people have to pay for the destructive behavior of the rich and powerful?



I don't know if the people who recently burned the Greek bank were police provocateurs or militants angry with the government. In the former case, the objective was to harm the people who are presently being harmed by the financial crisis. In the latter case, they were behaving stupidly.

The man who flew the plane into the IRS building was upset about how much he was paying to support the government. I suspect that he, or the people who expressed sympathy for his cause, are less concerned about military expenditures than the social programs, comparable to what the Greek government is forced to cut.

Returning to the war theme, how much violence has been the product of people returning from the wars, serving the interests of Wall Street and the rest of big business. Timothy McVeigh was justifiably regarded as an outlier, but more common violence, such as individual homicides and suicides, seem to be far more common among people exposed to the violence of war.

How much more guilty are the supposedly respectable people who promote our wars abroad than the disturbed young man who attempted to kill a couple hundred people at most? Instead, his incompetent attempt at violence will be used to justify far greater violence abroad.

How can we put an end to such hypocrisy and the violence it entails?

Finally, what about the everyday violence experienced by people denied the opportunity for a decent chance in life? What about inadequate healthcare or education? Isn't that a form of violence? If a capitalist society rewards some people with multibillion-dollar annual incomes of the official unemployment rate is near 10%, is it time to see that capitalism itself is a form of violence?

Employment and Unemployment Rate Both Increase

The news from BLS might sound like a mixed bag:

Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 290,000 in April, the unemployment rate edged up to 9.9 percent, and the labor force increased sharply, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

The household survey reports that employment increased by 550,000 in April, which increased the employment-population ratio from 58.6% to 58.8%. So why did the reported unemployment rate increase? The key here is this sharp increase in the labor force with the participation rate rising from 64.9% to 65.2%. Not bad for one month but a long, long way from full employment.

Oil Spill Doublespeak

White House officials stressed again Monday that BP would be held liable for the cost of the cleanup and economic compensation for losses on the Gulf Coast. But Democratic senators said the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, passed in the wake of the Exxon Valdez, caps economic damage liability at $75 million. Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida and Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey introduced legislation to raise that cap to $10 billion.

Ball, Jeffrey, Stephen Power, and Russell Gold. 2010. "Oil Agency Draws Fire: Republican Seeks Scrutiny of Regulator; BP Tries Well Fix." Wall Street Journal (4 May): A 1.

Immaculate Transmission Revisited

Over in VoxEU, Song, Storesletten and Zilibotti treat us to yet another explanation for China’s immense current account surplus, and as usual one that assigns the primary role to that country’s net savings. In this case the culprit is a bifurcated credit market that prevents Chinese investors from sinking their funds into the most profitable domestic enterprises. I will spare you the details; the giveaway/throwaway line is this one: “As a consequence, a growing share of domestic savings is invested abroad and this generates a capital account deficit and matching current account surplus.”

And how exactly does it generate the current account surplus? Why does the export of Chinese finance return in the form of net Chinese exports? Earlier in the article they denied that exchange rates have anything to do with it, so what other channel do they propose?

This is based on a forthcoming article in the AER, which means that a few reviewers there must have been asleep at the wheel. Looks like an easy outlet to publish in; I should give it a try.

Were Bubbles Or Fraud More Important In The Crisis?

This was not explicity the issue at hand at the conference on Consumer Decisionmaking: Insights from Behavioral Economics I attended recently at the Dallas Fed (cosponsored with UT-Dallas), but it emerged as an issue in the final talk by Christopher Foote of the Boston Fed, who tilted to the bubbles side, drawing on the earlier keynote speech by George Akerlof, although George did not pose it this way. For Foote, even though fraud and corruption increased during the bubble (and Akerlof argued that they tend to generally in bubbles), it was the housing bubble that sent everything over the top to come crashing down so disastrously ultimately.

Most of the other talks tended to focus either on misbehaviors by lenders and how to stop them (many participants among the 250 or so being people from many Feds or other govt agencies such as the FTC), or on the many psychological tendencies and limits that afflict consumers making them prey to such fraudulent and misleading activities. A good summary of these was given by the other keynote speaker, Sendhil Mullainathan. These include failures of perception, failures of analysis even when perception is accurate, and then failures to act even when both perceptions and analysis are accurate. I note a few other things reported including by Eckel and Croson of UTD that women, parents with children, and African Americans are too risk-averse for their own financial well-being, but from Jeff Carpenter of Middlebury, that risk preferences are not in general related to income or social class. Also unsurprisingly, people with low numerical ability tend to get into more trouble with their mortgage payments, all other factors held constant.

I support all the moves to educate people better, to regulate the lenders more to be more transparent in their activities, and so on. But in the end I think I agree with Foote that it was the bubble and the psychological tendencies ("animal spirits") to such that led us into this most recent disaster, not the longrunning exploitation of innocent victims by fraudulent lenders that did so.

Making the Most (Which Means Sometimes Making the Least) of PowerPoint

The abuse of PowerPoint has been in the news recently, but it is never far from the thoughts (or deeds) of conference-weary academics like myself. We sit through, and often inflict on others, endless presentations, typically in the form of monotone recitations of vacuous generalizations, or worse, dense paragraphs, plastered on the screen in front of us as bullet points. We squint at giant tables with tiny numbers. Our minds reel as equations fly by. It is enough to make you want to cry out “Chicken, Chicken, Chicken”.

Here is some simple advice I give my students, and try to follow myself, on the proper use of PowerPoint. Some of it was inspired by Edward Tufte, some is my own invention.


1. The center of attention for any speech should be the speaker. Speak in a way that connects to your audience. Make gestures and facial expressions. Look at them, not at a screen. A talk should be, above all, a form of human interaction.

2. If you have complex data, like large tables or long equations, put them in a paper handout, and distribute this to your audience. You can put much more on a page than on a computer screen, and your listeners will appreciate the opportunity to examine this information at their own pace. If I must display a table in Powerpoint, I try to have no more than eight cells, less if possible. This often requires ruthless paring and simplification.

3. The main purpose of PowerPoint should be to make the architecture of a talk more transparent to the listeners. The problem with oral communication is that, while it can be extremely engaging on a moment-to-moment basis, it is difficult to follow the structure of a long, complex argument. PowerPoint can help. Begin with a slide or two that presents the roadmap for the talk as a whole. Insert periodic slides that indicate where you are in this journey as you proceed. Most slides should serve to convey the structure of particular sub-points—mini-roadmaps, in a sense.

4. Slides should not be free-standing; they should not convey your argument apart from your verbal presentation. Bullet points, if you use them, should be compressed into as few words as possible, just enough to identify (but not explain) the ideas they refer to. (The bullet point for this recommendation could be “identification, not explanation”.) And never, never, never read the bullet points out loud to your audience. The center of attention should be on you, not the slides.

5. Think of each slide as a two-dimensional space, to be organized in a way that conveys the intellectual structure of your argument. In general, a list with equal indentation conveys logical parallelism. The vertical dimension of a list may convey sequence, but this usually needs to be indicated explicitly, for instance with arrows. A picture in the right column with several brief phrases in the left column says that these phrases pertain in a parallel or perhaps sequential way to the situation depicted in the picture. Indentation, on the other hand, implies either a subset/superset or supporting/supported relationship. When relationships between ideas are more complex than this, consider placing phrases in various locations on your slide, using boxes and arrows to make their interconnections clear.

6. Never, ever make a slide more complex than absolutely necessary. Abjure all of PowerPoint’s fancy bells and whistles. Keep fonts and color schemes as simple as possible. You want to your audience to glance at the slides periodically but pay attention primarily to you.

7. The reason so many PowerPoint presentations are dull is because a content-poor visual medium has become the center of attention. Reading an article or book is much more interesting, because articles and books typically have much more substance than PowerPoint slides. Listening to a lecture without PowerPoint is usually more interesting because of the human engagement audiences can have with a speaker who addresses them directly. So use PowerPoint sparingly: don’t try to replace the role of a written text, and don’t distract audiences from your communication with them. It should add a little clarity and a bit of variety to your talk, nothing more.

Is Economic Theory Going Into Black Hole?

Back from conference at Dallas Fed on "Consumer Decisionmaking: Perspectives of Behavioral Economics." Keynote speaker George Akerlof spoke on his recent book with Robert Shiller, _Animal Spirits_. However, beyond his speech he spoke more forcefully, declaring at one point, "economic theory is going into a black hole," both micro and macro.