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when a gang-rape is ordered by local government to punish the brother of the victim for something he didn’t do and that wasn’t criminal or even wrong and that gets whitewashed by the highest national court (with the local council apparently not even indicted), it’s important to say “Everyone’s culture is just as good as [...]
Archive for April, 2011
April 21st, 2011
April 21st, 2011
Category: Crime Control, Prisons and penal policy
Today’s New York Times includes an amazing story by Adam Liptak and Lisa Fayle Petak. Its opener speaks for itself in underscoring the misguided mindset of our justice system. More than a decade ago, a 14-year-old boy killed his stepbrother in a scuffle that escalated from goofing around with a blowgun to an angry threat [...]
April 21st, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
Bradford Plumer offers some interesting thoughts in this piece about the causes of slow federal progress on climate change legislation. Climate change is a world public bad and most people free ride. Overcoming the free rider problem is tough. How do you build up a “moral majority”? The people of Berkeley are willing to do [...]
April 20th, 2011
Category: Commerce and its discontents, Handbasket, world going to hell in, Popular Culture, Strange world
A Saturday Night Live sketch from the late 1970′s featured a store that only sold Scotch tape. Not tape — only Scotch tape. Then, when the economy went bad, the sketch said that the store did well because everyone needed Scotch tape for their “Going Out Of Business” signs. It was a pretty funny sketch; [...]
April 20th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine
or so Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson in the Adventure of the Priory School. But the British aristocracy would be put to shame by the post-nominals available to academics. To wit, the current issue of Journal of Opioid Managment includes an article by John S. Henshaw, MBBS, MMed, FANZCA, FFPMANZCA. The last of these [...]
April 19th, 2011
…which Matt will win because he will channel his Inner Tarantino and slice my head in half. But before then, let me express some skepticism that Matt’s rational actor utility-maximizer will come through for us. 1) Strictly speaking, it seems to me that the competitive market theory does not imply that firms will always maximize [...]
April 19th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
The Who have that song “Won’t be fooled again” . Are the folks at the rating agencies whistling that song? In a repeated game, reputation matters. If ratings agencies want to continue to attract business, they have incentives to build a reputation as a “trusted straight shooter”. In my preferred world, rating agencies [...]
April 19th, 2011
Lots of talk across the blogosphere regarding Standard & Poor’s “downgrading” of US Treasury debt. But let’s recall the source. Standard & Poor’s, together with Moody’s, is one of the great dupes of the recent financial crisis (villains, if you are more cynical). It repeatedly issued AAA ratings to what we now know — and what any sharp-eyed [...]
April 19th, 2011
A public health expert raises again the plan to divert Afghan opium into worlwide pain relief.
April 19th, 2011
Category: Affordable Care Act, MSM (mainstream media)
Congratulations to David Leonhardt, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and others. A dissent on the Wall Street Journal.