Thanks for all 115 answers to my "how to spend a billion dollars" challenge. Two general observations:1. When you claim that X is most efficient way for the federal government to spend an extra billi…
Suppose a city's population exogenously rises. You might think that price theory clearly implies that demand for real estate will rise. But that's not so. In theory, higher population could generat…
Jacob Levy directs readers to the Mission Statement of the Freedom Center at the University of Arizona. I agree that these are values to be emulated. While I sometimes allow the perfect to become the …
In the cost/benefit analysis course i teach, one of the actual cost/benefit analyses we work our way through--and one that I present as a reasonably good CBA--is a study done by two St. Louis Federal …
Jim Flynn's latest book has fascinating info on age and intelligence. But Sternberg, Wagner, Williams, and Horvath, "Testing Common Sense" (American Psychologist, 1995) suggest that Flynn misses an i…
Ronald Coase famously advised economists to "look out the window" every so often. It's advice I (try to) take to heart. Here's an example. On Monday afternoon, I was standing behind our building waiti…
Arthur Breitman and I have hammered out the following inflation bet: If the 12 month change of the CPI-U as reported by the BLS is greater than 5% for any sliding window between today and December 201…
Linda Gorman, my former Naval Postgraduate School colleague and author of three excellent articles in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (here, here, and here), has written a post laying out some w…
Here's a quick update to yesterday's post on what I've been reading lately. I had to give to exams this morning, so that gave me plenty of time to read. If you're looking for something to take to the …
My Ph.D. students' responses to the following question on their final exam disappointed me:In the modern U.S., what is the most efficient way for the federal government to spend an extra billion dolla…
In case it's unclear, nothing in my analysis of conformity and virtue implies that I personally am especially virtuous. The fact that I hold many unpopular views does however mean that my virtue is u…
The best talk I attended at the annual meetings of the Association for Private Enterprise Education (APEE) was a luncheon speech given by Kenneth Elzinga of the University of Virginia. I have know Ke…
One of my favorite essays in the social sciences is James Buchanan's very short "Order Defined in the Process of its Emergence." It probably has the highest ratio of insight-to-text of any article I'v…
Consider a world where 80% of people are Conformists, 10% of people are Righteous, and 10% are Reprobates. The Conformists are epistemically and morally neutral, so they believe and support whatever …
I tell people I have the best job in the world: I get paid to read, write, think, and talk about things I find absolutely fascinating. Here are a few things I've read recently (or that I'm reading cur…
I just read Arnold Kling's Featured Article on Mark S. Weiner's The Rule of the Clan. On the strength of the review I bought the book. Here's Kling's summary of Weiner: 1. A decentralized order is po…
Sari, Ed. My friend Edward Lopez, who blogs here, linked on Facebook to a great story from the New York Times about an entrepreneur's solution to the challenge of dry-cleaning saris. It's neat and t…
I was pleased to see my old friend Ben Haller challenging me in the comments on my global warming econometrics bleg. He's in blockquotes, I'm not:The more crap you throw into the regression, the more…
What happens if you regress annual global temperature 1880-2011 on CO2, linear trend, and other stuff trending positively or negative over this era? The list of regressors should ideally include not…
How to Mislead and Undercut While Appearing to be Writing a News Story A friend who is an avid reader of the New York Times sent me a link last night to a piece by New York Times reporter, and my fri…
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