Life updates

Because I pretend people care about them and so every once in a while I write these posts.

Done with all my finals - did very well in economic history and macro. Econometrics exam frustrated me yesterday... it was fairly different from prior exams and from what I studied for, but not so bad that I'm worried about my grade, so oh well - it's done. I have maybe sixty undergrad finals to grade and then I'm done with the year.

Tomorrow I'm closing on the house!!!! And that will have a lot of work associated with it. We're getting a completely new roof right away. We're also going to be painting at least some of the rooms, staining the deck, some gardening, and insultating the crawl space all ourselves. Then there will be some jobs we'll get a contractor in to do. Oh... and then we actually have to move all our crap too.

That'll give me some things to do to keep me from going insane over four weeks of studying for my comprehensive exams in early June (on the initial micro and macro theory). So May is basically studying and house work for me.

But once that's set I hope June, July, and August will be more productive. A couple things are lined up:

1. First and foremost - in May/early June I will finish up a chapter for a book that Guinevere Nell is editing on the guaranteed basic income. If you pressed me, I would say that I don't support a basic income - but the chapter describes some of its benefits as a form of monetary policy.

2. Today I'll start responding to the reviewers comments for an article I have with Bob Lerman and Lauren Eyster titled "Can we Upgrade Low-Skill, Low-Wage Occupations? The Case of Apprenticeship in the Long-Term Care Occupations". Cleaning that up should hopefully be quick.

3. An article on Keynes's activities with Isaac Newton's papers in 1942 and 1943 needs a couple more paragraphs and then it's ready to submit. I started this during winter break and just haven't had time to revisit it.

4. Then longer term (i.e. - stretching into the Fall) I have a Critical Review article on Austrian business cycle theory for a special issue of the journal on Hayek, my NBER chapters (good God - how long has this been? the editor's chapter is still waiting on data which is why this just gets pushed forward little by little with no real urgency), hopefully some new work on the science and engineering workforce funded by a Sloan grant that will replace my teaching assistantship, and probably something else I'll dream up at some point.

It looks like this summer I'll be dividing my time between some projects at The Urban Institute and starting work on this Sloan grant, if we get it (which seems likely).

I'm excited about my classes in the fall. I'll be taking advanced econometrics, macro political economy (mostly Post-Keynesian macro and political economy), and gender analysis in micro (looks basically like a labor course, with a gender focus... gender economics looks like it will be my minor field).