If George W. Bush...

...had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved? ...had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have approved?

...had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?

...had visited Austria and made reference to the non-existent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?

...had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current on their income taxes, would you have approved?

...had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

...had proposed doubling the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?

...had then proposed doubling the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved? ...had promised detailed tracking of the spending from a $785 Billion Stimulus Bill and then postponed that oversight until 2010, would you approve or would you think something "smelled fishy"? If Bush had promised 48 hour advance posting of the same bill on the internet and only released it two hours before congressional approval, would you wonder what was being hidden from the public?

had been "addicted" to using a TelePrompTer, and was afraid to give a speech without having one, would you have approved ? Would you think he was intellegent? had pre-approved/pre-picked the list of reporters allowed to ask questions at his press conferences and refused to call on the correspondent from MSNBC (FOX with Obama), would you have approved? Is that a Fair and Balanced news conference? and a Republican Congress had given hundreds of millions of dollars to a group (the right-wing equivalent of ACORN) after its members had been convicted of voter registration fraud, would you approve of them to doing the 2010 Census, which will determine congressional districts for 10 years? Will you trust ACORN in 2010?

If Bush's White House Staff had spent over $300,000 flying Air Force One low over New York (for a publicity photo flyby with the Statue of Liberty) frightening the city, wouldn't you have expected Bush to make the pictures public? Would you have approved? Obama won't give them up, but he will release the secret "torture memos".

Would you have approved of George W. Bush moving the Census from the Dept. of Commerce into the White House and putting his Chief of Staff in control of the counting?

Obama's done all this in 14 weeks -- so we still have three years, eight-and-a-half months full of surprises ahead of us.

Rather than maximizing net societal benefits, this proposal raises the standard until (total societal benefits = total societal costs), meaning the net benefits to society are roughly zero. This is not an invalid framework for making a policy decision, but it is unusual. It represents a different value choice.

UK Labour cabinet member Hazel Blears suggests... “Maybe if we had some more women in the boardrooms, we [might] not have seen as much risk-taking behaviour” (Sullivan and Jordan 2009). Indeed, the financial services industry – one in which lap dancing is apparently considered appropriate corporate entertainment (UK Equality and Human Rights Commission) – is overwhelmingly male dominated. Women hold only 17% of the corporate directorships and 2.5% of the CEO positions in the finance and insurance industries in the US (Sullivan and Jordan 2009). In Iceland – home to a particularly spectacular collapse – it is said that there was just one senior woman banker, and that she quit in 2006 (Lewis 2009). If men are especially prone to being insufficiently risk averse and overly confident, then this male dominance may have contributed to the financial crisis...

In a fascinating and innovative study, Coates and Herbert (2008) advance the notion that steroid feedback loops may help explain why male bankers behave irrationally when caught up in bubbles. These authors took samples of testosterone levels of 17 male traders on a typical London trading floor (which had 260 traders, only four of whom were female). They found that testosterone was significantly higher on days when traders made more than their daily one-month average profit and that higher levels of testosterone also led to greater profitability – presumably because of greater confidence and risk taking. The authors hypothesise that if raised testosterone were to persist for several weeks the elevated appetite for risk taking might have important behavioural consequences and that there might be cognitive implications as well; testosterone, they say, has receptors throughout the areas of the brain that neuro-economic research has identified as contributing to irrational financial decisions.