Cheer up, Professor Krugman
I start to wonder if grim is Paul Krugman’s favourite word. According to Google, it’s appeared more than 30 times on his blog so far.
A few of the grim highlights:
Speaking of grim, here’s an interesting chart, the use of ‘grim’ in blogs with at least some authority (some links from other blogs) according to Technorati:
What the heck explains the seemingly regular cycles?!
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Mildly depressed people are more in touch with reality and also estimate probabilities more accurately than “normal” people, as discussed in this Conference Board article.
Can you run the chart again with vertical bars every time Krugman writes a “grim” column?
To an English eye the cycle is easy to interpret. August, the kids are on holiday from school. Then they go back, things are less grim. Then there’s half term, grimness returns: rinse and repeat for Christmas and the next half term break.
I’d just like to point out that there’s no truth whatsoever to the rumour that we English prefer animals to our children. None at all.