Well, I’ve been told that thanks to the other family members present, my presence in the kitchen is not required, in fact is strongly discouraged. So, some odds and ends relating to previous posts.

On the role of international competition or the lack thereof in making decent wages possible: This stuff is my home field; it’s an area where I really, really know what I’m talking about. Here’s an old essay I wrote on the impact of Asia’s rise on the US, which is just the flip side of the alleged gains from a ruined Europe. The numbers have changed over the past 18 years; in particular, trade with low-wage countries is now much bigger, so that the distributional stories have more force. But the basics are there.

Oh, and this whole subject illustrates the importance of actually having a model — a story that describes what people do and how they interact — when you discuss economic issues, as opposed to just spouting off plausible-sounding rhetoric.

On the age of the Earth: I originally learned about all this from John McPhee, and it turns out that a lovely discussion of Hutton and all that is available online (pdf).

On the great Republican polling debacle: Dan Senor says that it was a “systemic problem” with polling. Except that if you actually did any kind of simple poll averaging, you got the race right. Senor does admit that the problem may have been more acute on the right-wing side, but then says that it wasn’t just on that side, because Rasmussen got it wrong. May I say that not considering Rasmussen to be “on the Republican side” tells you everything you need to know about the GOP’s analytical capacity, right there?

And you know what does illustrate a systemic problem? The fact that Senor, whose main claim to fame is his disastrous role as PR flack for the catastrophic Iraq occupation, is somehow considered an expert on something within his party.

Now, back to the big bird.