Gary Wolf The quantified self

Quoted by Martin Wolf in Why a President's Greatest Challenge is State Building Financial Times (London), 3 November 2004.

U.S. Men's Archery Team member Brady Ellison has caused a storm on Twitter after images of him looking eerily similar to the Wolf of Wall Street star surfaced.

But marriage can be a fraught institution (as Strauss Kahn may know better than most). The British economic journalist Martin Wolf thinks of Europe as a marriage kept together only by the high cost of divorce.

At TED Cannes, Gary Wolf gives a 5 min intro to an intriguing new pastime using mobile apps and always on gadgets to track and analyze your body, mood, diet, spending just about everything in daily life you can measure in gloriously geeky detail.

Other European countries are not just buying too little from Greece they are buying too little everywhere. As Martin Wolf of the Financial Times never tires of pointing out, there is a massive imbalance in Europe, and it is not the one you might think.

Both countries have massive surpluses of savings over investment and huge trade surpluses. Both parade their fiscal virtue and insist that deficit countries stop their irresponsible spending.

The first book is The Shifts and the Shocks, by the conservative British journalist Martin Wolf, who begins by cataloguing the major shifts that set the stage for the economic disaster that continues to shape the world today. His starting point is the huge rise in wealth among the world s richest 0.1 and 0.01 and the consequent pressure for people, governments, and companies to take on increasingly unsustainable levels of debt.

So, like Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf, and others, I would expand fiscal deficits, not try to shrink them. I advocate this for the old fashioned Keynesian reason that we are suffering from a deficiency of aggregate demand, that the multiplier is positive, and that the most effective way to reduce the private and public debts a year or two down the line is by taking steps to boost growth in national income now.

But the UK government could and undoubtedly would veto any such adaptation of the Bank of England s responsibilities for monetary policy, financial stability, and banking supervision. Any other conceivable model of monetary union including one based on a central bank as unaccountable as the European Central Bank would be subject to the same rejection.

Likewise, while Japan has the highest debt to GDP ratio among rich countries, this is not a serious problem because the debt is domestically held. And Europe s debt problems are now widely acknowledged to be due to ill conceived aspects of European integration.