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Among the many amazing things the gods of irony and absurdity have showered upon us in the last decade or so, I have to score serious discussion of a gold standard for money very high. Many years ago an economist friend explained that Marx’s labor theory of value was correct, but trivially correct, because there [...]
Archive for August, 2011
August 23rd, 2011
August 23rd, 2011
Category: Drug Policy
The latest Foreign Affair has my essay offering some ideas about drug policy, at right angles to the drug warrior/legalizer debate.
August 23rd, 2011
Category: Popular Culture
He was a tremendous songwriter and it’s hard to pick his best, but I know my favorite, which he wrote with Ben E. King. I played stand up bass and bass guitar for many years, and Stand by Me has a simple but fun baseline and great lyrics. It was used perfectly in the excellent [...]
August 22nd, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
A new NBER paper by a Dream Team of economists documents the wisdom of short selling crowds. Here is their abstract: “We study the predictive power of approximately 2.5 million stock picks submitted by individual users to the “CAPS” website run by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). These picks prove to be surprisingly informative about [...]
August 22nd, 2011
Category: Taxation
Always great to see a post by Robert Frank at RBC, this time him skewering the stale and intellectually dishonest argument that “anyone who thinks his taxes are too low can just choose to send in a check to the guvmint”. I have been vaporizing Tea Partiers who intone this dreck for the past few [...]
August 22nd, 2011
Category: Crime Control, Sports
I once characterized the statistic that domestic violence increases by 40% on Superbowl Sunday as one of those “vampire numbers” that gets continually repeated in policy debates even though there isn’t and never was evidence of its veridicality. The logic model underlying the Superbowl violence urban legend is that victorious male fans feel powerful and [...]
August 22nd, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
All hail the nudge? This NY Times article discusses the challenge of bringing about behavioral change in the Mississippi Delta so that people eat more healthy foods and fewer fried foods. When people ignore information that will “help them”, how do you explain that? Do you say that they are impatient? or do you blame their region’s [...]
August 22nd, 2011
Category: Blogging, Personal moment
If you blog, you don’t frequently receive credible market signals about the value of what you do. You experience psychic satisfaction. You can count the comments under your post. You get emails from friends and colleagues—not to mention the missives from strangers, friendly or otherwise. You can Google your stuff and check for good links. [...]