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Welcome to Pingree's Potato Patch, my online research lab for the study of Detroit's economy. I'll be keeping track of the results of my investigations here, along with collections of useful data. Feel free to leave comments on any of the posts, and if you want to contact me, you can use this form to send me email.
Add Comment 22 June 2009 - Kiva Opens To US Borrowers by David
My mom turned me on to the news that microlending pioneer Kiva has just this month opened it's lending system to business owners in the US. Here's a link to the AP story on the move. I'd like to think that this might serve as a resource for the many small business people in Detroit. We'll have to see...
Add Comment 05 June 2009 - Charts Update by David
I've finally pulled in another year of data on the Income and Employment portions of the Charts page. The worst of the current crisis doesn't really show up, but the data for 2009 is likely to be pretty ugly.
Add Comment 29 May 2009 - GIS Is A Lovely Acronym by David
My friend Zoe at work put me onto a datasource I wasn't familiar with called SMART. It's a Geographical Information System (GIS) supported by the United States Department of Justice, and can generate nifty maps of various socioeconomic data by census tract, city, and other geographical region. I may be working with it to help lay out the location of clusters of homeless families relative to the shelter placement, among other things.
Add Comment 20 May 2009 - Immigrants From Faraway Blogs by David
I've decided to copy over my economics posts from the Habitrail, just for the heck of it. So anything you see that dates from before February 2008 comes from there.
Add Comment 20 May 2009 - Economics in Fiction by David
While this is even farther afield from the main topic of this blog than unusual, I thought it might be of interest to the passing throng. There are at least a few pieces of fiction out there where economic concepts are central to the story; in the broadest sense these stories are forms of science fiction, where the key science is economics. The first story of this sort that I encountered was The Cambist and Lord Iron, a 2008 Hugo award nominee which basically took the form of a fairy tale about a humble cambist (i.e. a person who runs a foreign currency exchange) and a brutal and rapacious nobleman. It knocked my socks off, and now I've run across another one, The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, about a trained economist who, finding himself a destitute refugee from the fighting in Somalia, seeks to build his fortune with nothing but a solitary goat; it is effectively a fable of the modern age. If I find any more stories I'll post them here; feel free to let me know if you run across anything similar.
Add Comment 18 May 2009 - Modeling Minsky by David
Since late 2006 I'd been seeing references to Hyman Minsky in periodic updates from the Levy Institute, and I'd gotten the impression of him as a somewhat heterodox economist focusing on financial crises. I'd been meaning to look into him for a while, particularly given current conditions, but now Paul Krugman has announced that he'll be presenting a lecture entitled "The Night They Reread Minsky" (a riff on the classic period comedy The Night The Raided Minsky's), and then Steve Keen posted a link to his 1995 effort to produce a mathematical model of Minsky's ideas(pdf). Suffice it to say I'm reading through it with great interest.
As an aside, it is remarkable the extent to which the internet is able to at least partially assuage the pangs of distress I feel for not having gotten a job in my field yet...
Add Comment 15 May 2009 - So Invisible, It Isn't Even There by David
Brad DeLong linked to an interesting article by Gavin Kennedy which argues (persuasively, I think), that Adam Smith's usage of the phrase "invisible hand" has little if anything to do with it's modern usage, typically as a almost-mystical characterization of the holy power of the market, doing the work of God and not to be tampered with just because liberal blasphemers happen to dislike the results. This should be good for a bit of amusement at a cocktail party someday...
Add Comment 23 March 2009 - Echoes of the Great Depression: Detroit local scrip by David
Crain's is carrying an AP story today about a newly created scrip currency for use in Detroit. According to the somewhat more detailed story in the Detroit News, the currency, Detroit Cheers, is backed by $3000 placed in escrow by three Detroit businessmen: Jerry Belanger, (owner of the Park Bar and Bucharest Grill), John Linardos (owner of Motor City Brewing Works), and Tim Tharp (owner of Grand Trunk Pub). So far the currency is only being accepted by a small number of businesses, but given that it's convertible back to dollars and is thus relatively low-risk, I suspect that it may get picked up relatively broadly. I'm curious what the viability is of expanding the escrow base of such a local currency.
Add Comment 22 March 2009 - SBA Loans by David
I'm currently working on getting some data from the Small Business Administration, but there's a bit of interesting information on their site already, and in the interest of not losing track of it (not that that's ever happened to me before...), here's a couple of links:
Earlier years are also available by fiddling with the URL.
Add Comment 29 January 2009 - Brad DeLong, Money Velocity, and Local Economies by David
In a recent blog posting, Brad DeLong has presented one of the clearest explanations of monetary velocity I've ever seen, and it incidentally serves as an extremely clear example of the kind of leverage that increasing local economic linkages can provide for boosting growth.