Tyler Cowen writes:
Since old, high-bank-account white males have lots of social status and power, [believers in egalitarianism] cannot bring themselves to regard those males as holding very poor overall endowments.
Cowen claims that the poor old rich white guys’ supposedly “poor overall endowments” arise from the impairment of their human capital at the more-or-less imminent end [...]
December 5, 2008 – 9:42 am
Disclaimer: this post is on a topic about which I don’t really know that much. Thus please don’t feel slighted if I fail to cite you or a favorite scholar on the topic.
NPR ran a fun story this morning with two reporters and a GMU economist (horror of horrors!) to address the common-sense question: where [...]
November 11, 2008 – 1:21 pm
A common concern raised lately about the incoming Obama administration is that the past eight years have vastly reduced the capacity of the US federal state to do anything. This is principally a function of the incredibly reckless economic behavior of the Bush administration, but it’s also because the rhetoric of “Homeland Security” and “War [...]
November 7, 2008 – 9:25 am
It is a strange, fascinating oxymoron of American politics that magic and rationality coexist, no less than in our politics. Political scientists have been trying to capture this with reference to emotion; others with reference to religion in politics. None of this has seemed particularly convincing to me; this morning, though, I read Arjun Appadurai’s [...]
October 30, 2008 – 12:38 pm
The right-vs-left contest over the credit crisis seems to have crystallized to some extent into whether the crisis was the outcome of regulators forcing banks to loan to bad borrowers (the right-wing version) or of under-regulated banks and financial institutions peddling bad mortgage products and then aggregating them into un-valuable derivatives that “clogged” the credit [...]
September 22, 2008 – 8:45 pm
Whew. I found myself in uncharted territory this afternoon. On my way to picking my son up from school, I heard Newt Gingrich interviewed on NPR about his opposition to the bailout, expressed in his recent post on the National Review blog. And I agreed with him. Ugh! The Newt Gingrich, the one of Contract [...]
August 13, 2008 – 11:14 am
I had an appointment to get my teeth cleaned this morning. Imagine my surprise when after checking in and updating my paperwork the receptionist handed me a $10 gas card “to thank me for showing up for my appointment today.” Apparently people are so scared of going to the dentist, the office is offering incentives [...]
February 27, 2008 – 8:41 pm
“The Economics of Workaholism: We Should Not Have Worked on This Paper” by Daniel Hamermesh and Joel Slemrod.
February 27, 2008 – 10:09 am
1. Expend energy railing against the Patriot Employer Act, co-sponsored by Barack Obama. What’s to hate about it? From the Economist’s Free Exchange blog (h/t Mark Thoma):
There is much to dislike in the bill. Essentially, it offers employers a tax credit, worth one percent of taxable income, in exchange for adherence to a [...]
February 8, 2008 – 8:14 pm
I had a very interesting experience yesterday. Very interesting. Perhaps life-changing. You see a couple of weeks ago, I received a call from someone in the computer science department informing me they had a visitor coming to campus from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory who wanted to meet with me. “Ah,” [...]
February 3, 2008 – 1:12 pm
In a thread on orgtheory, the moribund blog “left2right” was brought up, which was apparently an effort by Rock Stars of the Academic Left to have a blog about reaching out to the right. In general, blogs fail when they are premised on the idea of writing for people who’ve adamantly no interest in [...]
