rock star professors

When Russel (my husband) returned from Harvard, after accompanying my daughter through knee surgery, he brought some copies of The Harvard Crimson. It was there that I discovered that Mary had one of the rock star professors of Harvard: Greg Mankiw, professor of economics and author of the popular Principles of Economics (catchy title). He was also the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to the Bush White House from 2003-2005. I discovered Mankiw has a blog on blogger.com, so I checked it out. There I found a link to the SNL spoof on Obama's presidency which was quite hilarious--though untrue and unfair. Here's the link to the blog: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/11/cost-differences.html

Just scroll down to find the snl sketch (October 18th blog) followed by a rebuttal from Princeton economist Alan Blinder (great name for an economist). And here's the link to CNN fact checker review of the SNL sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7x-dzXVcOw.

You may want to know that at one point Amazon.com sold an "I love Greg Mankiw" t shirt and that he had a Facebook profile until he reached the maximum number of friends--5,000 and closed it down.

So with such ringing endorsements, I was delighted to go to Harvard's Freshman Parent's weekend and attend the lecture by Mankiw. I was impressed, and even understood a great deal of the lecture. I plan on getting a book he mentioned called The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan. When Mankiw was advisor in the Bush administration, he told us at the lecture, he suggested to Bush the importance of a gasoline tax. Bush told him that it was a wacky idea. (The US has an extremely low gas tax: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E0DC1230F93BA35753C1A9609C8B63. By the way, for any of you believers in "there is no global warming, there is no global warming, there is no global warming" mantra, only 6 cents of a $2.00 tax, for example, would go toward global warming issues.)

Also, on his latest blog he shows an interesting graph that perhaps accounts for some of the U.S automakers' troubles: (Pic is at top of post for some reason.)

I had a mahvelous time at Hahvad.