NEW in August 2026! Maintaining this website is not worth the cost. Too few viewers. It is going away, slowly, as Annie gets older and needs to think about her next chapter. So - sorry - instead of updating the blog page for August, Annie is closing the blog down. Today, August 6th, the Systemic Bias page went away. Other pages will close down, to follow, unless there can be a "succession" that is in line with Annie's worldview. Please see "pipeline" photos on the History/Herstory page, for a glance into why she finds this necessary.

 

Movie for your consideration - "Brideshead Revisited." But only if you are interested in art, the University of Oxford, alcoholism, the Pope and the Church, and War. Book for your consideration - "The Catholic Church and America Today - Why the Claims of Dan Brown Strike a Chord." Or similar title, by Professor Eric Plumer of Scranton University, home of "The Office," USA.

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Unfortunately, this website has been hacked, and my naughty children are acting like Icarus and trying to fly too close to the sun. So I will not be posting anymore stuff, even though there is lots to post. Some of us are doing like the French in August and leaving the problems of the world to the rest of you. I hope I will be "allowed" to publish these changes. It's like my old friend Joan Stiebel said, "I am not in charge anymore." BTW, if you never knew the meaning of "The Day the Music Died," please ask my son Leo. It's all his fault. AND - "Simon" says, if you have a dog that bit a policeman, all you have to do to prove it wasn't your fault is get the dog's shelter history. He was found on the street, with a habit of eating just about anything he could find, with teeth ground down in such a way as to suggest he had been trying to gnaw his way out of a cage. Wasn't he? And he got bitten by a jellyfish. And he caught Valley Fever, which vets in the East Coast had never heard of. And he adored his master. I hope those shelter records have not "disappeared." There are witnesses. Like, say, vets. Lots of them. Not to mention doctors, in the search for whatever rare genetic human condition makes people trust doctors and vets, such that they consult doctors and vets rather a lot; then diagnose themselves absent an official diagnosis that matches the symptoms.

 

The academic papers at the links below are, first, an early presentation of ideas that foreshadowed the two working papers second and third below, and then the working papers themselves. Policy prescriptions in the first paper are fairly conventional - invest in rural regions, etcetera. During the pandemic, Annie realized that a tighter monetary policy would work better than those prescriptions. Such a policy must be carefully orchestrated.

 

A scholarly book, "This Time is Different," explains how pressure builds up in financial systems. Individual statistical tests can mislead. A whole body of them, probably not. (I am being polite here... but it's dangerous for an amateur to presume to advise professionals. It is also dangerous for politicians to trust financial analysts who have a conflict of interest in the matter. Adam Smith warned against trusting "merchants" wanting to influence the law. THAT particular Adam Smith's contemporaries called him a moral philosopher.)