NEW in August 2026! Maintaining this website is not worth the cost. Too few viewers. It is going away, slowly, as Annie gets older and needs to think about her next chapter. So - sorry - instead of updating the blog page for August, Annie is closing the blog down. Today, August 6th, the Systemic Bias page also went away. Upon discussion with "anonymous," today, August 23rd 2026, the Systemic Bias page is now being restored. Blog page may or may not return, if Annie has something delightful to share. Annie is still anticipating a "succession" that is in line with her worldview. 

 

TV Series for your consideration - "Brideshead Revisited." But only if you are interested in art, the University of Oxford, alcoholism, the Pope and the Church, and War. Book for your consideration - "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything," by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner - about incentives, statistics, and behavior in the everyday world. Book for your consideration - "The Catholic Church and America Today - Why the Claims of Dan Brown Strike a Chord." Or similar title, by Professor Eric Plumer of Scranton University, home of "The Office," USA. Movie for your consideration - "A Beautiful Mind" - "art" discusses academia, the spy world, brilliance, hallucinations, and human games. If you enjoy the crossroads between academia and the real world, you are invited to explore the "Inklings" group at Oxford University in England, in particular C.S. Lewis and his works; or the "Bloomsbury Group" in London.

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Unfortunately, this website has been hacked, and my naughty children are acting like Icarus and trying to fly too close to the sun. They are on notice that I may not be posting anymore stuff, even though there is lots to post. Some of us are doing like the French in August and leaving the problems of the world to the rest of you. I hope I will be "allowed" to publish these changes. It's like my old friend Joan Stiebel said, "I am not in charge anymore." BTW, if you never knew the meaning of "The Day the Music Died," please ask my son Leo. It's all his fault. AND - "Simon" says, if you have a dog that bit a policeman, all you have to do to prove it wasn't your fault is get the dog's shelter history. He was found on the street, with a habit of eating just about anything he could find, with teeth ground down in such a way as to suggest he had been trying to gnaw his way out of a cage. Wasn't he? And he got stung by a jellyfish. And he caught Valley Fever, which vets in the East Coast had never heard of. And he adored his master. I hope those shelter records have not "disappeared." There are witnesses.

 

Likewise, absent any personal interest in having a "diagnosis," some people might prefer to do battle with their families over the need for any such diagnosis. (Er, are we talking about dogs or people here? And would it be the elderly; caregivers for the very young; or the "different," who might need to confront a painful reality?) Annie has lived a long life and seen many examples of what we might call "Denial."  You are welcome to explore this website for what may be found in De Nile (the Jungian shadow), or In Seine (death by drowning). If you don't "get" the jokes, it's not your fault. Annie is a poet and a Brit, and she enjoys word games.

 

The academic papers at the links below are, first, an early presentation of ideas that foreshadowed the two working papers second and third below, and then the working papers themselves. Policy prescriptions in the first paper are fairly conventional - invest in rural regions, etcetera. During the pandemic, Annie realized that a tighter monetary policy would work better than those prescriptions. Such a policy must be carefully orchestrated.

 

A scholarly book, "This Time is Different," explains how pressure builds up in financial systems. Individual statistical tests can mislead. A whole body of them, probably not. (I am being polite here... but it's dangerous for an amateur to presume to advise professionals. It is also dangerous for politicians to trust financial analysts who have a conflict of interest in the matter. Adam Smith warned against trusting "merchants" wanting to influence the law. THAT particular Adam Smith's contemporaries called him a moral philosopher.)