Kat, those look awesome. I'm bookmarking that link for when I can be more indulge-y. I loved cable-knit tights when I was little. Since I was prone to wearing dresses, even in the dead of a Michigan winter, my mom always bought me cable knit tights. I lurrrved them.

Ooh, I'll have to try those.

Yeah. The problem is they are ridiculously expensive. I'm sort of in love with socks (and tights) from sock dreams.

I think - as a non-expert, but someone who works in academia - that economics is somewhat unusal in being a field with real-world, immediate applications that is based on relatively poor models. Human behavior is extremely difficult to model and generalize from (compared, say, to the behavior of water in pipes, which my husband models mathematically for a living, and which, despite being relatively concrete, is still quite complex to model.) I would place Econ with the other social sciences (sociology, poli sci) in this respect, but of these fields it closely resembles, economics seems to be the one whose public face is the most confident in its predictive ability and authority.

Aimee: www.mytights.com

Ooh, and now my secret santa has arrived! Well, not the actual santa, which would be even cooler, but still! This is shaping up to a very good week.

flea makes a better case than I do.

They're all retouched.

I know that, just like I know all novels are edited. But I can't usually point to exactly which chapters have been edited in a novel; I can look at a photo and say not just "that's been fiddled with" but "why is her jaw so blurry?" and "gee, that shape is tellingly regular" and my personal favorite, "Oh look! The lace bra that makes you not have nipples."

I had someone attempt to indoctrinate me into the "rational self-interest" theory of economics (anyway, an economist came up with it, but it was being applied to criminal law), and it all unravelled when I pointed out that, under the theory, everybody was a rational actor in their own self-interest -- if you go into enough detail about the circumstances surrounding the act. You have to tie yourself into knots sometimes, but some rational decision, in one's own self-interest, is in there somewhere, even if it's "I feel like being arrested today!"

It was one of those "that's very nice and cute, but NSM with the predictive or classificatory insight, is it?"

And that is all that I know about formal economics.

I can look at a photo and say not just "that's been fiddled with" but "why is her jaw so blurry?" and "gee, that shape is tellingly regular" and my personal favorite, "Oh look! The lace bra that makes you not have nipples."

The argument here is that you can only point to the bad retouching. Every other photo is retouched as well, but you don't notice all of it.

This is why I am saying, Please get the newer version of Photoshop. Retouching is like underwear: one only notices it when it is not doing its job.

At this point, I really want to read some good books on economics, as I don't fully understand all this stuff....

In all honesty I do not believe that professional economists fully understand the economy.

Probably the single most important thing to understand about economics is that it's all semi-imaginary. That is, economies only exist because we all agree to let them exsist, but economies all have very real consequences and effects. That's why even professional economists don't fully understand the economy. It should be completely under our control, and it is, except for the part where it's not.