Giving Speeches

There is an art to being a good public speaker. Practiced enough to not trip over words, or veer off on a tangent, yet casual enough to not sound too rehearsed. People need to hear sincerity and feel the passion in your voice, not a robotic recitation. At the 2012 DNC convention Bill Clinton gave a good example of how one might deviate from prepared text to deliver just such a speech. The comparison between prepared and contemporaneous remarks is useful.

ECO 712 News

I plan to use this space to share links to some of the topical news items I plan to discuss in class. Here are two article I plan to discuss:

The European Central Bank offers unlimited aid to euro zone members — but only if they behave

Ben Bernanke makes case for Fed to take more action

Here are a couple of graphs from FRED.
Non-Farm Payroll Employment.
Real GDP.
CPI.
Unemployment Rate.

Agnostic

Podcasts For Econ

You can find podcasts for econ here: http://audioecon.com/. I found this NPR episode on welfare for Millionaire farmers interesting.

Awesome Slide Decks

Have a presentation to give? Get some inspiration. Awesome Slide Decks: http://noteandpoint.com/

Wisconsin Job Growth By County

A few select Counties and Cities are below, but the rest of the data for the State of Wisconsin are here. I used the employment data available from the DWD. The last month available in the spreadsheet was March of 2012. I calculated the percentage change from 12 months previous, while including total employment and total job growth. Despite having very different political environments in Milwaukee and Waukesha their job growth was identical. Had I chosen different months I would have gotten different quantitative results, but qualitatively they would be similar. 

Area	Date	Employment	12 Month % Change	12 Growth in Jobs
Adams County	Mar2012	8558	-1.97	-172
Milwaukee City	Mar2012	241491	0.34	810
Milwaukee County	Mar2012	417550	0.34	1401
Waukesha City	Mar2012	36990	0.34	124
Waukesha County	Mar2012	200106	0.34	671

Race in America

Interesting differences between French and Americans in their views of race:

The movie is about a rich man who is paralyzed in an accident and hires an ex-con from the 'hood as his all-purpose live-in assistant. The fish-out-water pair become friends and Mr. Rich Guy gets his mojo back thanks to the other man's down-to-earth love of life. Poor guy learns to appreciate nice things and classical music. Rich guy learns to enjoy Earth Wind and Fire. The rich man is white, the poor guy is black.

French viewers loved it. American critics saw the servant part as a classic Magic Negro. David Denby, in The New Yorker, for example, complained that the movie is "disastrously condescending: the black man, who’s crude, sexy, and a great dancer, liberates the frozen white man. The film is an embarrassment." Similarly Jay Weissberg in Variety wrote that Driss, the ex-con, "is treated as nothing but a performing monkey (with all the racist associations of such a term), teaching the stuck-up white folk how to get 'down' by replacing Vivaldi with 'Boogie Wonderland' and showing off his moves on the dance floor."

The French reaction to this reaction, as described by Sotinel, must strike Americans as pretty funny. It amounts to this: Oh, yeah, that one guy is black. Leave it to you race-obsessed Americans to pick that up; we hadn't noticed. We didn't really notice that. (Negative French reviews of the film complained that it was hokey, Sotinel writes, but none mentioned skin color.)