Archive for March, 2011

March 31st, 2011

Danny Holt performed five numbers at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technology last night.  Holt is a formidable performer who, in this incarnation, plays a piano while also surrounded by, and greatly engaged with, a bunch of stuff to hit with sticks and hammers. Having learned to play all this percussion and the [...]

March 31st, 2011

Our grandchildren will be far richer than we are. Faked concern about their financial well-being should not be allowed to distort economic policy choices.

March 31st, 2011

Some friendly readers have asked me to blog about how self interested individuals will respond to abrupt climate change.     We could produce so much greenhouse gas such that we exceed an unknown threshold and trigger some irreversible nastiness.   What happens next as we scramble to protect ourselves?    Can we build new cities overnight?   We know that [...]

March 31st, 2011

Dave Schutz continues the conversation with Mark about what he called declinism in his original post: Mike kindly put me up on RBC as a guest in February, and Mark, our genial host, called me ‘orthogonal’ in his post of March 1: “But Schutz is simply wrong to treat the question of distribution as orthogonal [...]

March 31st, 2011

Yes, in some ways, good and bad. But that isn’t why I love it, or why Barack Obama loves it. “I love my country because it is mine.”

March 30th, 2011

… in rural Bangaladesh and in Indiana. The links between religious fanaticism and misogyny are strong, no matter which holy book the fanatics pretend to read.

March 30th, 2011

Republican Presidential candidates spew bile, not specifically because they’re bad people, but because that’s what the environment demands. Dreaming about a non-extremist GOP candidate is like dreaming about a swimming champion who stays dry.

March 30th, 2011

I have been preparing to teach my first MBA class ever at the Anderson School.   Don Trump should enroll in my “Real Estate Finance” class.  This class preparation has displaced some precious blogging time.   But, I did manage to write this for the  Christian Science Monitor.     There is a mildly deep idea here.   Social scientists [...]

March 29th, 2011

There’s no way on earth those test results weren’t faked, and no way Rhee can’t know that they were faked. Her slime-and-defend denial makes her an accomplice – at the very least – in a massive fraud.

March 29th, 2011

Some policy wonks are concerned about intergenerational equity and entitlement reform. Anothers express concern about estate and gift tax breaks and excessive tax expenditures that go to wealthy people. These two groups don’t overlap as much as they should. Affluent seniors can afford to contribute more in addressing our economic and budgetary problems. So a [...]