Econotalk

One of the reasons that I love to read about economics is that they use sentences like this (from the Economist's View blog):

One story you can tell about recessions is that the presence of wage and price stickiness throws relative prices off their optimal paths, and this sends false signals to markets and causing resource misallocations -- some sectors have too many resources flow into them, others not enough. At some point, however, these misallocations correct themselves and as resources become unemployed and move from the sectors where they were in oversupply (e.g. out of housing) and into sectors where they were underutilized, a process that takes time, a recession occurs.

Everything's always so neat, so clean, so rational. At least in this article, they go on to point out that theories don't always match up with reality. Unfortunately, the conclusion is frequently the same as the one found in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy regarding disparities between the Guide and reality: when there's a difference, it's frequently reality that's got it wrong.