He was pretty tough, all right
The great Frank Deford, from the Sports Illustrated vault: "The Toughest Coach There Ever Was" (originally published 4/30/84).
July 23, 2008
"The Free Market's Invisibility Problem"
"Much effort has been expended by libertarians in making the case for how the market could address any number of potential problems. This is important work, but presenting a brilliantly argued case for libertarianism only means success in a world of completely rational people. If we were living in that world, libertarianism would have prevailed long ago. The charts and graphs (the seemingly lone visual aids) trotted out by economists to make the case for laissez-faire economics are more likely to put audiences to sleep than inspire them to action. Defenders of the free market need new visual rhetorical strategies that highlight the human costs of intervention."
Noted blogs, rated
Vanity Fair rates some noted blogs on a two-dimensional grid. One axis is "Scurrilous" to "Earnest". The other axis is "Opinion" to "News".
Kinda cool.
One of the ways a professional poker player beats you
Joe Navarro discusses "Tells of the Mouth".
"The Power of TENS"
"TENS stands for Transcutaneous Electric Nerve Stimulation. . . . [It] works by disrupting the pain signals originating from the nerves near the pain spot, so the area that would normally be hurting feels sort of tingly. In some patients, the area goes numb after a while. In me, it loosens up my back to the point that, for example, I'm not wincing every time I so much as think about moving and I can actually walk around, bend occasionally, and be more or less functional."
July 22, 2008
"Time to Add Basket Weaving as a Course"
Commentary on another report--see my earlier post--about a school district considering a minimum score of 60.
The idea is that a mediocre student who is doing his best can pull a 60 up, when averaged with other grades, to a passing score. Whereas the same student might not be able to do the same with a score of 20 or so.
"We're making it possible for them to overcome some bad circumstances," the superintendent said, according to the newspaper report of the meeting.
As the saying goes, this looks like an idea "whose time has come".
I (almost) don't believe this
A story from Overheard in New York about a company that lost a $14,000 order because it was geography-challenged.
Helicopter parents are now hovering over colleges
And Jeff Cornwell at Belmont University thinks they should buzz off.
We now have to introduce failure into our curriculum so our aspiring entrepreneurs have a clue as to what might await them -- they have no experience with failure as children of helicopter parents.
It's been "refined" over more than 100 million years
More than you probably want to know about "Evolution's Most Effective Killer: Snake Venom".
"50 Best Websites 2008"
As judged by Time magazine. Ten each in the categories "Advice & Facts", "Information & Gossip", "Handy Tools", "Fun & Games", and "Hobbies & Interests".
July 21, 2008
Our legal system at work, part three
"In other words, because someone might not follow instructions, the rest of us should be deprived of a feature we might want to use."
Bits about two interesting-sounding books
Damn, It Feels Good to be a Banker.
About Wharton: "The fact it is attached to the University of Pennsylvania is [its] biggest and most tragic downfall . . . being lumped together with such a big, ugly mass of mediocrity creates insecure, overcompensating alumni."
About Harvard: "It's obvious that the university is trying to sell students on the notion that they could and should be the next Natalie Portman, John Roberts, or a writer for 'The Simpsons.'"
Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid (by the inimitable Denis Leary).
I'm sick of low esteem and fake fat-suit-wearing female talk-show hosts and extreme makeovers and steroid-laden home run hitters and Reese Witherspoon movies and Paris Hilton's himbo boyfriends and celebrity rehab and Dr. Phil.
How to cope with the (Pacific) wild salmon "shortage"
As economics predicts, substitutes are, and soon will be, available. Short answer: farm-raised Scottish salmon, wild Atlantic salmon, and arctic char. (The latter, though, isn't as rich in omega-3 fats.)
Jay Leno, Car Guy
"A few years back, Leno's curatorial tendencies led him to start jaylenosgarage.com, a General Motors-sponsored site whose videos feature him riffing on car minutiae at a frightening pace. And his keen interest in historic vehicles has led Leno to sponsor a scholarship at McPherson (Kansas) College, which offers a four-year degree in auto restoration."
Being smart about getting smart
Wired magazine: "6 Intelligence Myths Exposed".
Interesting, and I'll have to pay closer attention to the stories Wired runs. This article rejects--with a sneer--evidence that is "correlational, not causal". If all the major media did that, there'd be a whole lot of blank space, particularly on reporting about health.
July 20, 2008
An unbelievable itch
Reading this Atul Gawande piece (June New Yorker) is a little like rubbernecking a car accident. It's horrifying but you can't take your eyes away.
Michael Lewis doesn't like golf
He starts a recent Bloomberg column with this:
One of the amazing things about golf is how many people have been fooled into believing it is actually a real sport. All over the world people now talk and think about golf as if it's more like football or basketball than, say, bird- watching.
Then he gets ugly.
July 19, 2008
Kevin does Chris
Kevin Pollack does an amazing impression of Christopher Walken.
Here's Mr. Walken "hoofing, old school" in "Weapon of Choice".
Some of Will Rogers's fine observations
While looking for a particular Will Rogers quote, I found this nice collection.
This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it. That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation.
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
July 18, 2008
The good life?
If you're brave enough--or foolish enough, you decide--this country affords you a lot of lattitude to live exactly the way you want to.
The LA Times writes about a 52-year-old man, who was unemployed, twice-divorced, and had no savings, but who decided that he 1) wanted to live on the water in Newport Beach, 2) didn't want to work too much, and 3) wanted to play golf and tennis several times a week.
The Times reports that he's been doing that for eight years. (And no, he's not--at least, according to the Times--doing anything illegal.)
Breakthrough at Appalachian State
Physics class at Appalachian State figures out the secret of the Diet Coke--Mentos effect.
Al Gore, call your office
The editor of the American Physical Society's journal Physics & Society writes:
There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.
Now I may be missing something, but does that sound like "consensus" to you?
Just as dependable as death and taxes
Whenever AMD has a couple of bad quarters, they accuse Intel of antitrust violations (NY Times, last month).
July 17, 2008
Liebowitz v. OGS makes the Chronicle of Higher Education
The fine report by David Glenn is here. Note the ad hominem attack on Liebowitz:
In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Mr. Strumpf defends his work and suggests that Mr. Liebowitz's zeal stems from the fact that an academic center he directs, the Center for the Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation, receives grants from the Recording Industry Association of America and other commercial interests. "One might ask why Professor Liebowitz has remained so engrossed with our study," he writes.
Or, maybe he's just upset that a 40+-page lead article in one of the profression's top journals has serious errors.
"Mathemagic"
This would have really impressed me as a kid. It still does. But I don't know if today's kids would be so impressed.
(But note the auditorium full of mostly middle-aged people giving him a standing ovation at the end.)
A new use for a great line
Some wild-and-crazy kids taking Advanced Placement tests this year found a new use for one of the great movie lines of recent years.
(If you haven't seen it, here's the scene from the movie.)
You don't want these words on your chart
"8 Medical Terms Your Doctor Uses to Insult You". (NSFW; bad words.)
In case you need to know what "PRATFO" or "AMYOYO Syndrome" mean.
Tom Wolfe declares the WASP bond market dead . . .
. . . but the Economist blog says (June 25) it's not true.
July 16, 2008
I hope we never need this
". . . here’s what to do in 12 life-threatening emergencies when no one’s around to help."
Among several things I hadn't heard before was this:
If you still can’t breathe after six tries, call 911 from a landline, even if you can’t talk. They’ll find you. Write the word choking somewhere nearby, and leave the line open until help arrives.
Related: "Five Ways to Survive Any Disaster". [From Mother Jones; the Door is eclectic.]
I did find people with military experience seem to do very well in these situations. They've been taught that they can control their destiny, which is half the battle.
Still more: "How To Get Out of Quicksand".
Put some money away; deluxe retirement is expensive
From the LA Times, "Paying in Gold for the Golden Years":
The Mediterranean-themed complex collects an entrance fee of up to $1.3 million, along with monthly charges that can peak at nearly $5,500, depending on the unit.
What a surprise (not!)
"Finally we have a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals. After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease – with salacious, tombstone-illustrated government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or 'die of ignorance' – the head of the World Health Organisation's HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret."
The decline of the teen idol
New York magazine writer notices something I've noticed: teen idols aren't what they used to be. Not even close.
It sounds crotchety, but in our adolescence, celebrity heroes were at least semi-skilled. Debbie Gibson had pipes, and though the New Kids on the Block were no Beatles 2.0, that "Hanging Tough" dance was hard. Even 'NSync had actual vocal talent to hang their matching jackets on, as evidenced by Justin's, J.C.'s, and even Joey's post-band achievements. The idea that you could be famous merely for wearing giant sunglasses and having boy problems was ludicrous.
July 15, 2008
A worthwhile proposal
America's institutions of higher learning should heed this proposal from Jaime Daremblum of the Hudson Institute: open branch campuses in Latin America.
A way to bring Mugabe down?
He's running out of paper to print the hyperinflated currency he needs to stay in power.
Our Congress at work
Don't just sit there, do something really, really symbolic!
Congress: O.K. How about "Impeachment Kabuki"?
Tilapia--not so good
Other than being cheap, I haven't understood the popularity of tilapia. Here's another reason not to like it: "Popular Tilapia Might Not Help Heart".
A reminder of an amazing fact
Popular Mechanics:
In 1980, IBM released the first 1 gigabyte hard drive. The storage device, which was larger than a coffin and weighed more than 500 pounds, held less data than a typical USB flash drive does today. The price tag: $40,000.
(About $105,000 in today's dollars.)
Current price: about $.20 per gigabyte.
And Seagate has just announced a 1.5 terabyte drive, "the largest jump in capacity in hard-drive history."
July 14, 2008
Peter Gordon hits one out of the park
Certain people--I won't name them, because some of them would come here like bees to honey and leave dopey comments--think "speculation" is terrible. Some of them even want to regulate, even tax it.
USC Professor Peter Gordon has a different view, and since it's a short post and I recommend you read it all, I'll borrow just two sentences:
Price adjustments are essential and the key to market magic. . . .
All humans with a pulse plan beyond today and are, therefore, speculators. [Italics added.]
Heard anything about the "population explosion" recently?
No? Maybe because, in some parts of the world, birth rates are plummeting. See Jeff Jacoby's two columns, "The Coming Population Bust" and "A World Without Children". Or see this long New York Times analysis, "No Babies?"
The latter contains an interesting point for those folks who think we--Americans--should always imitate our betters in Europe. After noting that the U.S. fertility rate last year was 2.1, "the highest it has been since the 1960s and higher than almost anywhere in the developed world", the article asks: why is our rate higher, and then there's this:
“There’s much less flexibility in the European system,” [Carl] Haub [of the Population Reference Bureau] says. “In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid.” There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways. As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: “In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost — in the form of lower lifetime wages — is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force.” An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.
Looks like the market will come to the rescue, again
Folks are just beginning to realize some of the costs that will follow the government's freshly-minted requirement that we use CFLs. For one thing, they contain mercury, and mercury, in certain circumstances, is really toxic. Disposing of them properly is not trivial.
But Home Depot, and probably soon Wal-Mart, is providing an answer.
I can help
Are you talented? (I know that many of my readers are.) Do you feel a strange pull? A hard-to-define, hard-to-put-your-finger on tug toward lattitude 45 degrees north, longitude 93.5 degrees west?
Can't figure it out?
Want to know, at long last, why?
Allow me to assist. Help wanted ad for the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities: "The University of Minnesota is a premier employer and a talent magnet . . ."
Two on naps
A fine Boston Globe piece on how to nap. If you're early riser, look to nap between 1 and 1:30 p.m. If you stay up late, try 2:30 to 3:00.
Newsweek: "Seven Secrets to a Great Nap". It recommends between 20 and 30 minutes.
(Methinks print media's readers are skewing older these days.)
The LA Weekly continues its good fight
The LA Weekly reports that Los Angeles's Metropolitan Transit Authority plans to ask voters for "$40 billion for mass transit over the next 30 years". The Weekly then raises some interesting points:
Voters might question the scope when they learn that cities with extensive light-rail systems have been unable to take more than 1 to 2 percent of the cars off the road.
In fact, a recent study by Seattle’s Washington Policy Center, of the six West Coast cities that have invested in light rail since 1995 — L.A., Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Portland and Seattle — found it costs a princely $82,000 to $240,000 for each transit rider they have wooed on to their systems. . . .
In 1980, politicians similarly promised that a half-cent tax would build a modern transit system. In 1991, L.A. leaders again claimed that an additional half-cent was needed. Those dual transit taxes, Proposition C and Proposition A, provide MTA with an annual $1.4 billion windfall, but the agency has delivered only a fraction of what was promised.
Even the darling of mass-transit advocates, the city of Portland — which has embraced “transit-oriented development” and so-called “smart growth” — is in the throes of massive congestion, and local critics say the dense urban-development projects that were supposed to reduce Portland’s traffic have had the opposite effect. A nonscientific 2005 survey of more than 400 Portland residents showed that they wanted tax dollars to be spent on better roads. “Transit” came in a distant fourth in Portland.
July 13, 2008
Bill Gates has left the building . . .
Engadget looks back at his "top ten greatest hits and misses".
And a cool updating of the famous 1978 Microsoft-11 picture.
Best music, by state
The Boston Phoenix declares the "best all-time band, best all-time solo artist, and best new band by state".
Naturally, I can carp. Bruce Springsteen is not a "solo artist". Picking, for Texas, "13th Floor Elevators"--who?--over, for example, ZZ Top is wrong. Picking, for Pennsylvania, Trent Reznor for solo artist over Joan Jett is stupid. And picking, for Wisconsin, the Violent Femmes over BoDeans, is, of course, unconscionable. But they got at least a few of them right.
(Link courtesy of my older daughter.)
Traditional Scottish dress apparently wasn't
From a review of a book by Hugh Trevor-Roper:
The third myth is that of traditional Scots dress, which Trevor-Roper shows to have been got up, largely for commercial purposes, in the 19th century.
The kilt was devised by a Lancashire industrialist as a convenient form of dress for his Scottish employees; while the clan-based differentiation of the tartans was the invention of two brothers calling themselves the Sobieski Stuarts, who in 1842 published their Vestiarium Scoticum, an elaborate work of imagination which served as a pattern-book for tartan manufacturers.
July 12, 2008
We're number 1!
According to MSNBC.com, Raleigh is "the best place in the U.S. to be right now."
I haven't lived that many places in my life, so I lack places to compare, but Raleigh's pretty nice.
I'm disappointed . . .
. . . with Bryan Adams and Stevie Nicks: "6 Famous Songs That Don't Mean What You Think".
July 11, 2008
Try to wrap your mind around this
Read an interview with Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who is positing a fourth-level multiverse. (If you, like me, knew little about the first three multiverses, there's some background included.)
Like people used to say during the late 60s: "Like wow, man. Wow."
Two movies viciously slammed
Two of the nastiest film reviews I've ever read. (I haven't seen either; I have no idea if they're deserved.) Dana Stevens, writing for Slate, on The Love Guru:
There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad they're good (though, strangely, not the reverse). And once in a while there is a movie so bad that it takes you to a place beyond good and evil and abandons you there, shivering and alone.
Christopher Orr, writing for The New Republic, on The Happening:
M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie, The Happening, is not merely bad. It is an astonishment, so idiotic in conception and inept in execution that, after seeing it, one almost wonders whether it was real or imagined.
The BLM gets smart in less than a month!
I posted linked earlier to a story about how the Bureau of Land Management had imposed a two-year moratorium on new solar energy projects on public land so that it could study their "environmental impact".
Guess what? The Bureau has reversed itself.
Since 2005, the bureau has received more than 130 applications from private companies to build plants in those states, where large amounts of sun-scorched land make for prime solar real estate. Those proposals cover more than a million acres and have the potential to power 20 million homes.
The bureau will process all of the applications it received before the freeze, and now, as a result of Wednesday’s decision, will continue to accept new ones, studying the environmental effects of each proposed plant individually, Ms. Boddington said.
If only other less-than-intelligent government decisions could be reversed as quickly.
July 10, 2008
"The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs"
Divided into the following categories: art, economics, education, English, history, math, media/technology, music, philosophy, psychology, political science, sociology, and theology.
The economics section would be particularly strong even if it didn't include The Door. I thank Ms. Fiona Lewis for including me.
Very accurate
"Twenty-five Signs You Have Grown Up".
5. You hear your favorite song in an elevator.
6. You watch the Weather Channel.
16. You take naps.
Who was this man?
In 1758 "The thirty year old lawyer, nearsighted, already portly, chronically ill, now ready to read his notes in his grating voice, had spent the last seven years before the Bar in London with, a sympathetic biographer wrote, 'little notice or practice.'"
. . .
"Nor could he foresee that his words would shape the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and primal laws of a land he considered no more than conquered territory of the British crown. "
. . .
"In his 1941 book The Mysterious Science of the Law Daniel Boorstin wrote that no other book except the Bible played a greater role in the history of American institutions."
Happy 285th birthday, William Blackstone.
Two nice posts from Hamermesh
Noted labor economist Daniel Hamermesh has recently made two posts I especially like.
His July 8 post--his posts don't have individual links---argues, with an interesting example, that "allowing older workers greater flexibility in hours of work will become crucial as baby-boomer retirements begin to remove a lot of skill from the American workforce."
And his June 25 post explains why feeling busy is related to income.
The average human being will be substantially richer in 50 years, just as the average American today has a real income three times what it was in 1955. But the average human being will not have much more time in 50 years than today; and life expectancy has increased by only 10 percent in the U.S. since 1955, so for most people time has become relatively scarce compared to money. Not surprisingly, we feel more stressed for time than ever before—the opportunity cost of time has risen compared to the opportunity cost of goods. People with higher incomes usually express more time stress than those with lower incomes.
Concerning the last sentence, see this brief summary of research by Nobel Prize-winner, Daniel Kahneman, that finds wealth is positively correlated with "stress". Kahneman might not explain it the same way, but the finding seems consistent with Hamermesh's argument.
(I have been arguing the same point for several years in my MBA economics course and I also made it in this post.)
Rivals
Interesting review of a new book by Bill Emmott, Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade. In the last paragraph the review writes:
Sketching a "plausibly pessimistic" scenario, he [Emmott] suggests that an economic downturn and popular discontent could lead the Chinese Communist Party to wrap itself in the flag of nationalism and slide into conflict with neighbors over Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, Tibet or Pakistan.
Nah. Russia is soon going to be the "sick man" of Europe. If China needs to expand, or to fight, it seems to me the least complicated target would be Russia.
July 09, 2008
Two good stories and the answer to an important question
From "In Defense of Excessive Government" by Dwight R. Lee, Southern Economc Journal, 65(4) (April 1999), pp. 658-59.
I remember sitting around a table at a Liberty Fund conference a number of years ago with Jim Buchanan during a decidedly pessimistic discussion about the possibility of political reform. Suddenly, Jim cleared his throat, and everyone went silent in anticipation. Jim said something to the effect of "If its all hopeless, then just why in the hell are we here?" Good question.
I believe the reason we were there, and the reason for much of the work economists do, is that improvement is possible, and increasing and communicating our understanding of how the political economy works can lead to that improvement. Just communicating some basics of public choice to a wider audience can reduce the influence of politically organized interest groups. For example, being well organized in pursuit of a highly concentrated benefit whose cost will be thinly spread over the unorganized public is seldom sufficient for political success. To be effective, special-interest political activity must masquerade behind some plausible claim of public concern. Consider that Gordon Tullock has long favored a policy of imposing a tax of $1 on every American with the resulting $260 million going directly to him. He actually favors a higher tax, but not being greedy, is willing to settle for $1. His proposal has all the characteristics of a successful special-interest program. Gordon is a small group and has always been well organized. The benefits would be extremely concentrated and the costs so diffused and insignificantly burdensome to any one person that no one would be motivated to oppose the proposal. Despite these advantages, the Tullock proposal has never achieved political liftoff because it lacks any plausible pretense that it would advance some noble public purpose. Gordon is still working on a public-interest rationale, but so far without success.
The point is that if you strip away the public-interest facade cloaking a special-interest proposal, political support for the proposal quickly collapses. Public choice, by creating a coherent framework for understanding the political process in terms of private interests, is helping to penetrate the public-interest rhetoric and to expose the private-interest reality.
Dwight Lee, 1; Richard Layard, 0
Dwight Lee, again. He reviews Richard Layard's book, Happiness: Lessons From a New Science (Journal of Bioeconomics, volume 10, pp. 97-99, 2008). He eviscerates Layard's primary policy proposal:
The crux of Layard’s policy argument is that by earning more income you are generating a negative externality—in his words, polluting—because your higher income makes others unhappy. . . .
If the public, and then politicians, take seriously the argument that earning money (being productive) is equivalent to pollution, there is no end to the destructive policies they could enact. An entrepreneur who puts existing firms out of business by providing consumers with better products at lower prices is, according to this argument, polluting those who own and work for the bankrupt firms, and there should be a stiff entrepreneurial tax to correct this externality. Maybe Layard would approve of such a tax, but would he approve of a special tax on academics when they have articles or books accepted by prestigious journals or university presses? Consistency certainly requires that he support such a tax, since those academics who are successful publishers impose externalities (unhappiness pollution) on their colleagues whose relative publishing success is diminished.
Not to mention that the proposal has a disconcerting "Harrison Bergeron" vibe.
Why are English department faculties so weird?
"Nathan Reeson" advances a number of interesting hypotheses.
Academics should get a kick out of this
Mike Moffatt links to a paper--co-authored by a Door fave, J. Scott Armstrong--that reports terrible citing practices, at least in the marketing literature.
But that's not the best part. Mike then goes on a mini-rant about referee reports. You should read the whole thing. But here's a part that made me laugh:
My all-time favorite was a [referee] report that blasted me for not reporting the findings of some "key" paper in my field. I was worried that I might have missed an important work on my topic (that may have made my paper redundant). Until I discovered that the "key" paper:
- Was never published and was only available as a working paper.
- Was only available on the website of the author, a Ph.D. student.
- Was not even on the same topic as my paper.
An interesting law in Colorado
"In Colorado, rain barrels are illegal".
Colorado state law mandates that any water falling from the air is not yours. In fact, according to their site, its already been “legally allocated” — so, you don’t actually have any rights when it comes to using precipitation that falls on your property.
July 08, 2008
There's no denying the Peltzman Effect
Even the Washington Post(!) has to write about it. (June 9 story, with some nice quotes from Clifford Winston).
Hurricane season, 2008
An intelligent and interesting discussion of hurricane-season forecasts and some comments on the coming season from Brendan Loy.
Draft statement of Newmark's Second Law
"Any extremely successful company, any company that creates enormous, almost incalculable, social surplus, will be bitterly opposed by some people, and those people's opposition will end up with governmental action."
Case in point: Google. Here's the Boston Globe, reporting on people who are
. . . developing strategies to push back against Google, dilute its growing dominance of the information sphere, and make it more publicly accountable.
"Publicly accountable": as Jerry Seinfeld might snap, "Oh yeah, I like that idea."
A fine statement of economic principles
In case you missed it, Peter Boettke responds to a question about economic inequality:
So what should we economists be insisting on during the current political discussions:
1. Intentions do not equal results
2. Innovations that are economically viable cannot be orchestrated by government, but must come through the free market
3. Policies to eliminate inequality distort incentives and often harm the very individuals they intend to help
4. Politicians possess a shortsightedness bias and policies are adopted in order to concentrate benefits on well-organized and well-informed interest groups and disburse the costs on the ill-organized and ill-informed mass of voters/citizens. What is good politics in other words may very well be bad economics, and what would be good economics might be bad politics. . . .
Read his whole post.
Obama's veep, again
A New York article looks at Obama's choice of running mate and concludes--as I did, weeks ago--that Hillary is, by far, the logical--as Liberals use logic--choice.
Yet if WJC were to stop behaving like a petulant adolescent and muster up a change of heart — an enormous "if," I'm well aware, but doesn't he he owe HRC that much? — the case for Hillary would be nearly watertight. Unity. Brand equity. A fighter’s mettle. An ass-kicking ability as a debater. What more could you ask for in a veep? It’s a question that, I bet, will be plaguing Obama in the days and weeks to come.
The article also discusses "three potential picks, all names that have been both highly touted by the Great Mentioner and are, I’m told, getting a serious look in Chicago". Two of these names are Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel.
Republicans can only hope.
July 07, 2008
New Liebowitz paper available on file-sharing
This is my fourth post on Stan Liebowitz versus Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf , but the dispute is quite important and deserves wide examination. Stan's new paper is available at SSRN. Here's the abstract:
Through a stroke of luck, a referee report in the review process at the JPE has been positively identified as the Oberholzer-Gee/Strumpf (O/S) response to my earlier comment. Regardless of the response's provenance, what counts is whether it solidly refuted my comment. This 'sequel' analyzes the O/S response. The O/S response only deals with four of the nine points discussed in my comment, leaving the five remaining critiques unchallenged. The conclusion of my review is that the O/S response fails as a defense of these four points and contains many of the same types of errors that marred their original paper. This sequel also discusses the history of this dispute including O/S' various reasons for not making their data available. Finally, this sequel provides full documentation on the JPE's decision not to publish the comment.
Fabulousness, in two parts
Part 1--send to certain Congressmen--"What Onions Teach Us About Oil Prices". They teach us that 1) even in a market in which futures trading is prohibited by statute, price can rise (and fall) astonishingly fast, and 2) "The volatility has been so extreme that the son of one of the original onion growers who lobbied Congress for the trading ban now thinks the onion market would operate more smoothly if a futures contract were in place."
Part 2--send to certain candidates for Congress--"Middle-Income Tax Burden: Lowest Level in Decades". Mark J. Perry at Carpe Diem links to a press release from the ranking Republican member of the Joint Economic Committee which states, "Recently released Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data show that the total effective federal tax rate of the middle fifth of households declined after 2001 to its lowest levels since at least 1979."