You wouldn't think that tanking an economy would make anyone happy but it puts a spring in the steps of a small group; economics professors.    

If the lousy economy is cause for a party, the election of Barack Obama and more government meandering is apparently icing on the cake.    Witness Professor Panicos Demetriades of the Economic and Social Research Council's World Economy and Finance  Programme, who is today speaking at the 'Politics of Macro-Adjustment and Poverty Reduction' Conference.

Economics is always called the dismal science, because it has science pretensions yet never makes accurate predictions.   The outlook, according to economists, is always rather bleak.

But given the current state of the economy, economists are downright ecstatic, because they can be relevant again.  And, in this case, it turns out they are a lot more optimistic than unemployed people are about the future.

You know when economists are cheery things must be pretty bad.   

If you're in the prejudice business the worst thing that can happen is to have a woman and an African-American fighting it out to be President.   A white guy has a tough time out there these days and that's a good thing for society because it means that America continues to be the least racist country in the world.

But if you're in the prejudice business the death of institutional racism and the demise of cultural racism means you'll need to look deeper;  namely to find people being prejudiced against themselves.    Then you can say it's the legacy of old prejudice and the cycle continues.

Okay, you're thinking a guy who started a site where scientists write feature articles directly to the audience must be insane to endorse big media science journalism, right?   

Not at all.  Science journalism is a different beast than what we do here but it still has more commonality than it lacks and that's why I was intrigued by a recent back and forth between Professor Larry Moran of the University of Toronto and Chris Mooney of Seed Media's Scienceblogs.com.

Moran is never one to pull punches - that's why I have him on my blogroll - but that doesn't mean I always agree with him, I just like his style.

Show Me The Science Month Day 19

Merriam-Webster's dictionary says the word 'evolution' originated in 1622 and derives from the Latin evolutio, "unrolling, from", as in a parchment, and this is actually the perfect way to think of both Darwin and Evolution in their context.