Newmark's Door

Two relatively large downloads, if you've either got the time or a fast connection:

A cool little Java that shows you zip codes on a map of the U.S.

Peanuts (the cartoon) set to Outkast's "Hey, Ya." (Uses Flash.)

The Guardian shows, and explains, the "10 greatest sports photographs of all time."

James V. DeLong argues that open-source will not replace firms and markets, and it will not take over the world.

A useful reminder: ". . . 20 years ago, Hollywood fell just one vote short of winning a ban on the VCR."

Capitalism is just so cool. A bunch of smart people make money by searching e-Bay for misspellings.

The ante for new Ph.D.s in economics just keeps going up. One newly minted Ph.D. from U. Texas Austin reports having five fields and his thesis is entitled "Five Essays on the Economics of Law and Language."

AtlanticBlog has a very nice post on why we might not want to replace a progressive income tax with a flat tax. Citing a book by Eric Rasmussen and Frank Buckley, and a recent paper by Gary Becker and Casey Mulligan, Professor Sjostrom raises the possibility that a flat tax would actually make it easier for the government to deprive businesses and the public of their income. (I believe, but can't find the cite at the moment, that Steven Landsburg also raises this possibility in his wonderful book, The Armchair Economist.)

I think that this argument is sound. But as with the vast majority of economic arguments regarding public policy, we need empirical evidence. I still think it would be worth taking the risk to try a flatter tax. (Maybe somebody has already tried to tease out the effects by comparing the progressivity of different states' tax structures?)

UPDATE: Professor Sjostrom reports that Landsburg's anti-flat-tax argument does not appear in The Armchair Economist. But I've found where it does appear: http://slate.msn.com/id/2030.

Law professor Jonathan Turley writes an excellent op-ed about something I've wondered about for a while but thought maybe I needed to be a lawyer to understand: "Facts are often withheld from juries, which can lead to ill-informed verdicts."

Gawker is interesting, but having never lived in Manhattan, some of it is over my head. But I did live four years in D.C., so the new "Gawker for D.C."--Wonkette--promises to be even more interesing.

I haven't worked with it yet, but EconSim (TM), "Extensible Economics Simulation Software," looks interesting.