Economist

AMERICANS ARE an impatient lot, and the $11.7 trillion U.S. economy is already drowning in information. So who would have predicted success for a handful of wonky Weblogs geared more toward telling people how to think about money than what? But success there is. These Internet sites, some of which get 10,000 readers a day or more, won't directly make you a better stock picker or car buyer. Instead, they offer intelligent people supplying market-oriented commentary on Social Security, sex, Socrates and a thousand other interesting subjects.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment, died last night at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass., of natural causes. He was 97. His death was confirmed by son J. Alan Galbraith. Dr. Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his books was The Affluent Society (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to re-examine its values.

John Kenneth Galbraith's best-selling books challenged the idea that a surging economy was a measure of social excellence and instead urged government to divert more of the nation's wealth to social needs. The longtime professor of economics, who was 97, died Saturday of natural causes at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., according to his son, Alan Galbraith. Galbraith's fame was cemented with the 1958 publication of The Affluent Society," a phrase that soon worked its way into our language, and The New Industrial State, a follow-up work published in 1967.

In Vienna, Steve Hanke had a colleague with his teeth all gone. The year was 1978, and the colleague was Russian. His teeth went away during a series of lengthy imprisonments in Siberian labor camps. His crime? He was an economist who kept suggesting there were a few problems with the Marxist system.The memory of the man with no teeth came back to Dr. Hanke three days ago, in a room at Johns Hopkins University. Hanke teaches applied economics there, when he's not hopping around the globe advising foreign governments on how to embrace capitalism.

If a new promotional gambit by Britain's venerable magazine The Economist proves successful, perhaps one day the quintessential marketing query "Will it play in Peoria?" will be supplanted by "Will it be boffo in Baltimore?" The Economist, a weekly published by the British company Pearson, is using Baltimore - chosen because it is a typical American market for the magazine - to test a new effort to increase newsstand and subscription sales, along with brand awareness. The test involves employees of the magazine and four agencies on both sides of the Atlantic.

President Clinton plans to nominate Katherine G. Abraham, a labor economist at the University of Maryland, as the new commissioner of the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, administration officials and colleagues of Ms. Abraham said yesterday.If nominated and confirmed by Congress, Dr. Abraham, 38, who has spent most of her career in academia, will head the agency that produces several of the most important statistics for measuring the economic health of the nation and for gauging the success of any administration.

The Baltimore-Washington area economy struggled in 1991 but could be staging a strong recovery by the third quarter of this year, a University of Baltimore economist told the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors' commercial/industrial exposition yesterday.Michael A. Conte, director of the university's Jacob France Center for Business and Economic Studies, said state and local indexes of leading indicators pushed up sharply in December and January before retreating slightly in February."If we see another jump of any magnitude, we're going to call for a major recovery," Mr. Conte said after appearing at the exposition at the Baltimore Convention Center.

The National Association of Realtors' chief economist told local real estate agents yesterday that he believes the Baltimore housing market has hit bottom and 2008 should be a better year - assuming buyers don't sit on the sidelines, anticipating major price drops. "This area will be very interesting to watch because there's very solid economic growth, but people aren't buying homes," said Lawrence Yun, the economist. He added: "Ten years from now, people will look back at 2008 and say, `Wow, that was a great time to become a homeowner.

NEW YORK -- It was in the abysmal days of 1981, when bonds were worth about as much as wallpaper and some people thought they were headed lower still, that economist Richard Hoey opined that the market was at a 100-year low. In 1982, when the country was in a steep recession, he forecast an imminent recovery, later adding it would last a postwar record seven years.The duration of the bond market forecast alone would make Mr. Hoey stand out ("it was the most unhedged forecast given by a Wall Street economist ever," he asserts)

Log onto theeconomist.com and pretty much the only thing you'll see is a giant mug shot of Alan Greenspan - which irks The Economist magazine to no end. The 165-year-old English publication, read by financial and political junkies worldwide, is stuck using plain old "economist.com" - sans the all important "the" - as its Web home, even though it has trademarked the two-word title. Three weeks ago, a United Nations intellectual property arbitrator ruled that while he's "highly sceptical and almost incredulous" over aspects of the situation, there's no legitimate reason to rip the domain name from the owner who claimed it in 1996.