Imagine- July 13, 2008 When Greg Mankiw, rather than John Lennon does it ("What if the Candidates Pandered to Economists", in today's NY Times), he mentions these: support free trade, oppose farm subsidies, leave oil companies and speculators alone, tax the use of energy, raise the retirement age, invite more skilled immigrants, legalize drug policy, raise funds for economic research. Mankiw imagines that these arehttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/07/imagine.html Ideas matter- July 13, 2008 In terms of stimulating ideas per page, few papers that I know come close to "The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins" by Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Salines and Andrei Schleifer, in the June, 2008, Journal of Economic Literature. As the title suggests, legal origins matter a lot. Common law traditions beat civil law traditions when it comes to explaining institutions that begethttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/07/ideas-matter.html More dense than smart- July 7, 2008 More on my June 18th blog. The Census Bureau's Demographic Trends in the 20th Century (page 33, Figure 1-15) shows that the share of Americans living in the suburbs grew in every decade. Central cities' share was 31.4% in 1970, 30% in 1980, 31.3% in 1990 and 30.3% in 2000. Over these years, the central cities were expanding by annexing and the census bureau was steadily enlarging the set ofhttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/07/more-dense-than-smart.html Public intellectual- July 6, 2008 Robert Reich is a public intellectual, interviewed in today's NY Times by Deborah Solomon. Among his responses is this: "... public transit has been the poor child of infrastructure spending in America." This is beyond silly and easy to check. The quickest check is at Demographia, where Reich and others can find that in 2006 road and highway subsidies per passenger mile were $0.010 whilehttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/07/public-intellectual.html American red meats on the 4th- July 6, 2008 Not only is red wine consumption healthy, but it should be taken with red meat to mitigate some of meat's toxic effects. This from The Economist (July 5) "Of sommeliers and stomachs ... Red wine exercises benefits before it enters the bloodstream." What little red meat I cosnsume these days is bison meat. It's as easy to get online as the beef. Brad Hill points me to PERC research on bisonhttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/07/american-red-meats-on-4th.html Lucky or good- July 2, 2008 I like to define wisdom as the acceptance of coincidence. We are disposed to make snap judgements rather than to follow the statistical rules of evidence. We have a problem with randomness in that it is not in our second nature. Indeed, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (which I blogged about some months back). Goinghttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/07/lucky-or-good.html |