What is the difference between fiscal and monetary?

When economists talk about fiscal policy they are referring to raising and spending taxes.

Monetary policy is what central banks do to control the amount of money in an economy. Normally they do this either raising/lowering interest rates. Raising interest rates restricts the amount of money circulating and should reduce inflation. Lowering interest rates encourages expenditure as there is more money available.

But as everyone know these are not 'normal' economic times. Interest rates in the advanced western economies have fallen to close to zero - but the recovery remains this. To counter this some central banks have introduced something called quantative easing.  Put simply means pushing more money directly into the economy via the banks - see here for more details.

Top ten most quoted lines of poetry on the Internet?

A very surprising list compiled by the Inky Fool. He analysed the Google Search result data and came up with the following:
10. Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all 2,400,000 Tennyson
9. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair 3,080,000 Shelley
8. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield 3,140,000 Tennyson
7. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams 4,860,000 W.B. Yeats 
6. Not with a bang but a whimper 5,280,000 T.S. Eliot
5. And miles to go before I sleep 5,350,000 Robert Frost
4. I wandered lonely as a cloud 8,000,000 Wordsworth
3. The child is father of the man 9,420,000 Wordsworth
2. I am the master of my fate 14,700,000 William Ernest Henley
1. To err is human; to forgive, divine 14,800,000 Alexander Pope
Full Top 50


Some initial thoughts:

1. What happened to the big guy? Shakespeare's highest entry is a miserable 13 with My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun while To be or not to be barely makes the Top 20. 
2. The Romantics remain crowd pleasers (Wordsworth has two entries, Shelley though perhaps surprisingly Keats lags behind. 
3. Pompous Christmas Cracker philosophising also good box-office (step forward Mr Tennyson). 
4. Slightly mystified by Henley's close second. Perhaps he appeals to the modern inclination to personalize ('I am the master of my fate'). Like a mawkish rendition of My Way in a Karaoke bar, the defiance has an undertone of self-pity.  Phillip Larkin provides a bracing antidote to this mindset ('what remains of us is love')
5. Over-familiarity produces a certain weariness when it comes to the winner. Few would dispute the the profundity of Pope's line. Nonetheless one suspects its victory is due less to literary merit than to its ubiquity in online sermons, religious and secular. 

What is crowdsourcing?

We figured that consumers would be the best judges for us ... designers  submit ideas and then asks customers to vote on them. Only the top vote getters are offered for sale.

Crowdsourcing is the marketing equivalent of 'asking the audience' in a radio show. 

The first use of the term crowdsourcing is usually attributed to a 2006 Wired magazine article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. Howe argued that the rise of cheap consumer electronics means that 'the gap between professionals and amateurs has been diminished'. Now companies can tap the knowledge of an informed public: "It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing."


Interestingly Steve Jobs took the opposite approach, often quoting the apocryphal Henry Ford's line,"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." As the joke goes: Q. 'What's the Apple version of a focus group? A. The left side of Steve Jobs' brain talking to the right side. 

Full Time article on crowdsourcing here and an example from education here:

What is a MOOC?

A MOOC is an online course with open enrolment and no fees. MOOCs are now offered by a variety of educational providers including some of the best universities in the world, including Stanford & MIT. MOOC advocates see the movement as offering the chance to give poorer/more remotely located students access to the best available education - see here.

Which countries do not have an official language?

According to Henry  Hitchings new book Language Wars there are only eight nations which do not have an official primary language. These are: the UK, the USA (though 20 states now have one), Pakistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Costa Rica and Bosnia-Herzegovina. At first glance it appears a fairly random list but there are some key underlying factors as  to why these countries have adopted an official language.

Intractable religious/linguistic/political divisions may explain the three African countries. The area that once formed Ethiopia, for example, has an astonishing 84 languages according to the Ethnologue. 

With Pakistan there is a similar story: a nation essentially created on religious grounds containing a number of competing communities. Urdu is the de facto official language, only this arrangement is not formalised as it is with it close cousin Hindi in India. And in Bosnia there is little appetite for opening a linguistic battlefield for obvious reasons.

Costa Rica does not have the obvious political tensions that usually makes language contentious. It has historically been the most stable democracy in Latin America. But though Spanish dominates, there are competing languages:

Some native languages are still spoken in indigenous reservations the most numerically important are the Bribri, Maléku,Cabécar and Ngäbere languages some of which have several thousand speakers in Costa Rica - others a few hundred. Some languages like Teribe and Boruca have less than a thousand speakers. An Creole-English language (also known as Mekatelyu) is spoken in the Caribbean coast. Around 10.7% of Costa Rica's adult population (18 or older) also speaks English

English has, of course, become the world's de facto second language. So the appearance of the two giants of Anglosphere: the UK and the USA on the list may seem puzzling. I would argue that this is essentially a product of self-confidence - English achieved a natural preeminence without the need for any paperwork to support this role.  Only where that dominance has been challenged - by Spanish in some US states, for example - has there been a legal attempt to formalise English as the official language.

From this point of view, the assertion of language can be a defensive measure, often linked to a fragile sense of nation. My Irish parents, for example, were taught entirely in their national language (Gaelic). The only problem with this was that Gaelic was a foreign language to them - the vast majority of Irish people have been speaking English as their first (often sole) language for more than a hundred years. And as Kingsley Amis points out in The Old Devils, translating signs 'for those Welsh people who don't recognise the word taxi' suggests that some language revivalists may be trying a little too hard.

Which eight nations do not have 'official' language?

According to Henry Hitchings new book Language Wars there are only eight nations which do not have an official state language. Can you guess what they are?

Here's a clue to help: three of the countries are in Africa and two in Europe. Two are very surprising!

Answers in the next post

What is cognitive dissonance?

In psychology cognitive dissonance is describes the tension caused by having two apparently contradictory thought processes simultaneously - wanting to smoke while knowing smoking is bad for you, for example. 

The phrase was first introduced by Leon Festinger in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails. He studied the way believers in UFOs dealt with empirical evidence contradicting their deeply held beliefs. It is also associated with the cognitive development theory developed by Jean Piaget - dealing with cognitive dissonance is a key factor in child development.

In modern parlance the term is often used when describing how politicians deal with 'inconvenient' data - examples can be found on both sides of the political spectrum.