Dead Rapping Economists

I don't know why this hasn't already taken over the Internet .

Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek in a rap video

HT: Caleb Sjogren

From what I've read, the portrayal of Keynes as a playboy is historically accurate.

Budget Planning with Excel: Macros

If you've never created a macro in Microsoft Office, you're missing out. You probably have some repetitive task that you wish you could automate. Well, it probably is possible to automate it (though it might take writing some computer code).

There is a way to create macros without dealing with code: you can tell Excel (or Word, or other Office programs) to record a macro. I won't explain this; if you haven't done it, just search for "record macro Excel" and you'll find the info you need.

To deal with the code that underlies macros, you use the Visual Basic Editor. Open this program by pressing Alt + F11 from Excel. It should look something like this:

Though you won't have the module Budget2010 and its code. That's what I'm going to give you.

I can't take time to explain everything about this editor or the language (Visual Basic) that it uses. There are millions of web pages out there that explain these, as well as a decent help file in the Visual Basic Editor itself.

For now, just try adding a module (Insert > Module) and giving it a meaningful name (instead of the default Module1). Then copy the code below and paste it into the module's code window:

Sub AddAnotherLinetoDate()
'Shortcut=Ctrl+D
'Adds another row below the current one, so you can record another transaction for that day.
Dim s As Worksheet
Dim r, c As Long
Dim d As String

Set s = ActiveSheet
r = ActiveCell.Row
c = ActiveCell.Column
d = s.Cells(r, 1).Text
Rows(r + 1).Insert Shift:=xlDown, CopyOrigin:=xlFormatFromLeftOrAbove
'Give the new row the same date as the original row.
s.Cells(r + 1, 1).Value = d
'Gray out the date in the new row
s.Range("A" & r + 1 & ":A" & r + 1).Font.Color = RGB(169, 169, 169)
s.Cells(r + 1, c).Select
End Sub

The comments (the lines that start with ') explain what this subroutine does: it adds a new row to the selected date. To try the macro out, select a cell in Excel, then go back to the Visual Basic Editor, put your cursor anywhere inside the code, and press F5.

Of course, you don't want to have to open the Visual Basic Editor every time you run a macro, so you can give macros keyboard and button shortcuts. I'll explain how to do that in my next post.

In the meantime, you'll want to save your Excel spreadsheet, which now has this code stored in it as well. In Office 2007, you have to save the spreadsheet with the .xslm extension to enable macros.

Dear Stonybrook Center,

How did I get on your mailing list for people dealing with opiate addiction? I figure a good chunk of my junk mail comes from the Evangelical Theological Society selling their mailing list, but I don't think I should blame them. Unless that imminent Evangelical collapse I've been hearing about has finally happened . . .

For the record, I support counseling and believe that it shouldn't bear a stigma. Helping people recover from addiction is a difficult and important task that I respect. I'm sure the folks at Stonybrook Center do a fine job.

Unless they're some sort of scam, which may be why they don't come up on Google and their phone number seems to belong to a moving company.

Mesmerizing Texts

Gorgeous ASCII animation.

I love this stuff.

HT: Alan Jacobs

Budget Planning with Excel: The Columns

What columns do you need in your Excel spreadsheet to track your finances? Well, the way we do it, you need one column for each

1. Source of income
2. Account that holds money (assets)
3. Account that you owe money (debts or liabilities)
4. Category of regular expenses

The first three should be easy to identify. I have one job, my wife has one job, so there are two income columns. We have a checking account, a savings account, and each of us carries cash, so there are four asset columns. We have a few credit cards and some student loans (our debt columns).

Deciding how many of the fourth kind of column (budget categories) you need takes some trial and error. We currently have about 20 budgeted columns. Just to give you some ideas, here they are:

Groceries
Toiletries
Household supplies/Laundry
Clothes
Missions
Life insurance
Health care
Car insurance
Gasoline
Car maintenance
Rent
Renters' insurance
Electricity
Water/Gas/Garbage [all three of these appear on one bill]
Landline
My cell
My wife's cell
Dates
Social events
Travel

And the big catch-all:

Other

We've set a certain amount of money that goes into each of these columns at the beginning of the month. Any leftover money should carry over to the next month, but the reality is that sometimes you have to steal from one column to make up unforeseen shortfall in another. This is where trial and error comes in. If one column is always short and another is always over, maybe you can change the allocations. Or maybe (if the Groceries column is always short, for example) you need to rein in your spending.

Finally, I should mention one other kind of column that is largely optional. I have columns for the deductions that come out of our paychecks before they're deposited: taxes, retirement, flexible spending accounts. I included them this year for the sake of completeness, but they're out of the picture for the basic monthly budget. They mostly don't interact with other accounts and budget categories, and my pay stub already shows me what the running total is.

In the next post, we'll start talking about the macros and forms I use to save time in entering income and expenses.

Works of Genius

Last night I finished The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. (Whom I loved at first read.) This book was a delight from beginning to end. I was so often looking up from it to tell Mrs. Chaka what I had just read that I might as well have read the whole thing aloud to her.

After finishing it, I realized that I've read quite a few spectacular books recently. The following are my recent reads that I do not hesitate to call Works of Genius (the star means it was a re-read):

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Planet Narnia by Michael Ward
*Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
*The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
*The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Recently read books that I'd place just shy of genius include:

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
Word Myths by David Wilton
The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers
Becket by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Budget Planning with Excel: Cell Format

Tip Number 2: Make ordinary numbers appear as dates and currency.

I use a worksheet for each month of the year. The lefthand column of the sheet gives the date. You don't have to type 1-Jan, 2-Jan, 3-Jan, etc for the whole month. Excel can interpret a positive integer as a date. Here's how it works.

1 = January 1, 1900
2 = January 2, 1900
. . .
40,179 = January 1, 2010

So try this: Put "40179" in cell A5. Right-click A5 and choose "Format cells." Select "Date" from the Category box and choose the Type on the right. You'll see a preview in the Sample window.

Now your 40179 is transformed into a date.

To populate the rest of the dates for the month, create a formula in A6: "=A5+1". After you hit Enter, A6 should show 1/2/2010. You can copy A6, select the next 30 rows or so, and select Paste. You now have a month of dates.

You can redo this for every month (February 1, 2010 = 40,210), or I suppose you could do the whole year in one sheet.

The format for most cells in the sheet (everything east of column A and south of row 4) will be Currency. I prefer the format that shows negative numbers in red with parentheses. When the cells are set up like this, Excel will automatically interpret an entry like "4.1" as $4.10 and -38.5 as ($38.50). High visual contrast and a minimum number of keystrokes. That's what I like.

Budget Planning with Excel: Freezing Panes

Here's Tip Number 1: Learn how to freeze panes properly. This is a feature of Excel that never works the way I think it should, but it is possible to freeze the leftmost column(s) and topmost row(s) so that they're always visible when you scroll elsewhere in the document.

In Excel 2007, the Freeze Panes command is on the View tab. Pre-2007, it's under Window.

The trick is to select the cell that will be in the upper left-hand corner of the lower right-hand quadrant before choosing "Freeze Panes." Got that?

If you select the cell highlighted as "This one!" in the picture above, you'll freeze the top two rows and the leftmost column so they're always visible.

At the risk of belaboring the point, it may help to think of this command as cutting the sheet into four quadrants (the "panes"). Excel will make a cut along the top of the selected cell and along its left side.

If you mess up, there doesn't seem to be a way to adjust where the "cuts" lie. You just have to unfreeze the panes and try again.

(HT: Tech Xpress)

Budget Planning with Excel

I spent New Year's Day gearing up to track the family finances. Since the beginning of our marriage, Mrs. Chaka and I have used an Excel spreadsheet for this purpose. I was planning to migrate to something more fully featured, such as GNUCash, but after playing around with that program for a bit, I felt that a couple modifications to Excel would serve us better. This is because I'm lazy and didn't want to learn a new system.

Now, credit where credit is due: Mrs. Chaka started our budget, using a system she learned from her mentor Jason Falck. Any blunders I've introduced should be laid at my door, of course, not theirs.

You may have heard of Dave Ramsey's envelope system: You put the budgeted cash in an envelope and when the money for that category is gone, it's gone. Our system is like that, except we use Excel columns instead of envelopes. There's a Gas column, a Groceries column, a Rent column, etc. When we make a payment from our credit card or bank account, we deduct the money from two columns--the account and the budget category. E.g.,


On the 5th of January there, the $24.86 we spent at Valli Produce (The Platonic Ideal of a Grocery Store) was deducted from our credit card (USAA) and from the Groceries column.

One of the reasons Mrs. Chaka and I both dreaded working on the budget in the past was the time it took to enter every expenditure twice--sometimes more than twice, since we often needed to use comments to make notes about the transaction.

My goal on New Year's Day was to hack Excel to reduce the number of times I have to enter the same information. In the next few posts, I'll share my results.

My Goodbye Song for 2009

Sing us out, Bob.

Ommwriter

Ommwriter claims to recapture for you the ability to write without distractions. Yet it's not featureless: it has variable fonts, sizes, backgrounds, even different sound effects for your typing.

I think I know what Alan Jacobs would say: Those are the distractions. And Neal Stephenson would wonder, will your words still be there in five years?

Long quote from Stephenson's book, In the Beginning Was the Command Line, available for free here:

I began using Microsoft Word as soon as the first version was released around 1985. After some initial hassles I found it to be a better tool than MacWrite, which was its only competition at the time. I wrote a lot of stuff in early versions of Word, storing it all on floppies, and transferred the contents of all my floppies to my first hard drive, which I acquired around 1987. As new versions of Word came out I faithfully upgraded, reasoning that as a writer it made sense for me to spend a certain amount of money on tools.

Sometime in the mid-1980's I attempted to open one of my old, circa-1985 Word documents using the version of Word then current: 6.0 It didn't work. Word 6.0 did not recognize a document created by an earlier version of itself. By opening it as a text file, I was able to recover the sequences of letters that made up the text of the document. My words were still there. But the formatting had been run through a log chipper--the words I'd written were interrupted by spates of empty rectangular boxes and gibberish.

Now, in the context of a business (the chief market for Word) this sort of thing is only an annoyance--one of the routine hassles that go along with using computers. It's easy to buy little file converter programs that will take care of this problem. But if you are a writer whose career is words, whose professional identity is a corpus of written documents, this kind of thing is extremely disquieting. There are very few fixed assumptions in my line of work, but one of them is that once you have written a word, it is written, and cannot be unwritten. The ink stains the paper, the chisel cuts the stone, the stylus marks the clay, and something has irrevocably happened (my brother-in-law is a theologian who reads 3250-year-old cuneiform tablets--he can recognize the handwriting of particular scribes, and identify them by name). But word-processing software--particularly the sort that employs special, complex file formats--has the eldritch power to unwrite things. A small change in file formats, or a few twiddled bits, and months' or years' literary output can cease to exist.

Now this was technically a fault in the application (Word 6.0 for the Macintosh) not the operating system (MacOS 7 point something) and so the initial target of my annoyance was the people who were responsible for Word. But. On the other hand, I could have chosen the "save as text" option in Word and saved all of my documents as simple telegrams, and this problem would not have arisen. Instead I had allowed myself to be seduced by all of those flashy formatting options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practicable. I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty (perhaps prettier than they deserved to look; all of the old documents on those floppies turned out to be more or less crap). Now I was paying the price for that self-indulgence. Technology had moved on and found ways to make my documents look even prettier, and the consequence of it was that all old ugly documents had ceased to exist.

It was--if you'll pardon me for a moment's strange little fantasy--as if I'd gone to stay at some resort, some exquisitely designed and art-directed hotel, placing myself in the hands of past masters of the Sensorial Interface, and had sat down in my room and written a story in ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad, and when I returned from dinner, discovered that the maid had taken my work away and left behind in its place a quill pen and a stack of fine parchment--explaining that the room looked ever so much finer this way, and it was all part of a routine upgrade. But written on these sheets of paper, in flawless penmanship, were long sequences of words chosen at random from the dictionary. Appalling, sure, but I couldn't really lodge a complaint with the management, because by staying at this resort I had given my consent to it. I had surrendered my Morlock credentials and become an Eloi.

The Peanut Butter Video from Sesame Street

Anytime I'm cooking, and the recipe calls for both salt and sugar, this song gets in my head. Every single time, people. This is what Sesame Street does to you.

Update on No Problem

I was talking to technical support the other day. After I explained the device's malfunction, the gracious and polite technician's first words were "No problem." And it grated. I had a flash of irritation. If it wasn't a problem, I wouldn't be talking to you. Then I realized that our conversation had simply skipped a groove.

We were following a script, the technician and I. My script didn't have the line, "Can you help me solve this malfunction?" but it might as well have. That is why people call technical support, after all--to request help. It's such an integral proposition of the call that it didn't occur to me to verbalize it.

Of course, if I had happened to verbalize the request, the exchange would have made perfect sense. In the technician's "[It is] No problem," the referent of the "it" was my (implied) request, not the malfunction. If the conversation did skip a groove, it was probably my fault for missing my line of the politeness script.