Philosophy
Hiatus
I just wanted to let my loyal fans (yes there are now two) know that I haven’t been killed in a freak gasoline fight accident. Over the past few weeks kids, holidays, work and work have overwhelmed my time making me incapable of acheiving my goal of blogging like Megan McArdle.
Over the next coupla weeks [...]
Counter-cyclical demand watch #1
So we’re in a recession, and in a recession people tend to buy less of most everything. That is unless you’re dealing with inferior goods. So what’s been shown to be economic inferior goods lately?
Pasta. From a post to Curious Capitalist you can learn about the Pasta Index and the currently fabulous fortunes of the [...]
Strange names likely screw with your kid’s future
Do unusual names really affect future outcomes for your children? A study out of the States by David E. Kalist and Daniel Y. Lee - First Names and Crime: Does Unpopularity Spell Trouble? - suggests that this might be true.
Their objective in the study:
We investigate the relationship between first name popularity and juvenile delinquency to [...]
Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy
If you have any interest in the writings of Adam Smith and see his name and works seemingly quoted in the press, you really should take a peak at Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy. Gavin Kennedy, a prof out of the UK, does an excellent job deconstructing and critically evaluating the general misuse, misunderstanding and misquoting [...]
All the financial crisis blather is making economics reading boring…
We need more challenging and entertaining stuff like these (mostly from the recent AEA conference):
Dwight R Lee’s article entitled Should Government Reduce Inequality in Life Spans? with such swell quotes as:
Government transfers to reduce the gender gap in life expectancy would do little more than reduce improvements in both women’s and men’s life expectancies. For [...]
Bush was a freemarket leader?
Since the market crash that followed the cratering of the property market in the US and elsewhere, many people have been shouting that this cratering proves that capitalism and markets don’t work. The contol-the-world types of both ends of the spectrum have trotted this one out, often for political expediency, but mostly because they seem [...]
Starting up again…
So I’ve actually been nagged by my loyal reader again and have decided to shake off the holiday blahs and get back into this effluent that I call “writing”.
Over the holidays betwixt events and Events and the like I worked my way throughsafer loads of TV and movies and had the chance to read through, [...]
US Libertarians demonstrate why they are unelectable
An article titled The Left-Libertarian vs. Right-Libertarian Controversy is a clear example the kind nitpicking that makes the US libertarian movement marginal.
Libertarianism is generally defined as individualism, with clear property rights and minimal (but not zero) government - and is clearly an antonym of authoritarianism. A pretty simple definition. Getting into the line between left [...]
Che Guevara was a murdering thug
Reason TV published a video about the celebrity impact of Che Guevara juxtaposing it with interviews by a Cuban-in-exile musician and a Chinese basketball player who played during Mao’s tenure.
The clearest point made in the segment is that people seem to very comfortable wearing clothing of mass murderers as long as they’re the communist brand [...]
Disincenting everyone is a poor policy idea
I stumbled across this book by Daniel Raventos distributed by the University of Michigan Press. In it Mr. Raventos suggests that everyone should have, freely available, a subsistence income with no strings attached. He supports this idea with these perceived benefits:
Anyone could opt out of employment at any time. Those with few skills would no [...]
But I tried really hard. Honest.
From the Post comes an article about a highly entertaining study that shows the level of entitlement of university students. Ellen Greenberg from UC Irvine polled 400 undergrads and developed some conclusions from the results. From the article:
Ms. Greenberger’s study reveals that students who are academically entitled are more likely to engage in academic cheating, [...]
O’Rourke on how “the movement” blew it
P.J. O’Rourke writing in the Weekly Standard as usual delivers in a libertarian bent with highly engaging and only slightly hyperbolic prose. Writing about how the US conservative movement (in my parlance: libertarianism) blew it over the past many years. I aspire to write as cleanly and here are a few choice quotes:
“After the events [...]
2 for 1 better than half price
The Guardian reports that Broadspeed.com significantly improved sales by changing their tactic from half-price to two-for-one:
Empson said: “It was amazing. We had been trying to sell those cars online at half price for nearly a month and they were selling, but it was nothing special. But when we made the deal two-for-one, we got 22,000 [...]
The US election
It’s getting close to the end of the campaign, something I’ve been looking forward to for the past many many many months. Mostly it’ll be good to see the end of all the caterwauling, whining, whinging and substance-free attacks the candidate teams and their media posses are making on each other.
Unlike the fatuous Brad DeLong, [...]
