Political positioning

Just to prove that the blogosphere is really a sphere -- the more you use it the more likely it is that you will end up where you started!

And appropos of nothing much except that I thought it was interesting.

Dani Rodrik has a post about a post by Greg Mankiw that points to a ["useful" according to Rodrik] site that computes your coordinates on the political map after you take a quick online questionnaire. The comments on the Mankiw blog indicate that a number of people thought that the questionnaire was badly set out, didn't provide a "middle way" (only four choices allowed), and, in several of the questions, used language that was not appropriate.

Hey, you guys where's your sense of light-weightedness? This is obviously not intended to be the ultimate judgement on your political position. It's an indication of thoughts and feelings at the time you are ticking the boxes. If you've ever looked back at your Myers-Briggs Personality Profile as it was five or ten years ago and compared it with now then the chances are that you will be "in a different box".

Have you met me? Do you know me? Do I come over as an extrovert? Ah yes, but, am I an extrovert? No, I'm not but I was! I realise that the shift from extrovert to introvert is achieved by how you respond to statements such as (not from the real "test") "Conversations 'at the water cooler' are a) a waste of time or b) a necessary part of interacting with colleagues". Whilst I worked with colleagues I would have seen b) as accurate now that I work almost entirely alone I realise that many of these conversations were actually a waste of time so now it's a).

And, at the end of all this I did not end up where I started but somewhere completely different so maybe blogoworld is not a sphere after all.