1. Using TiVo fast forwards to predict American Idol winners.
2. An optimistic view of the mortgage market.
3. John Rawls on the superiority of baseball; recall I once described him as the least Hansonian thinker ever.
4. The legacy of Milton Friedman; Brad DeLong comments.
5. Does foreign occupation really cause suicide bombing?
Man, that Rawls letter is total bunk from start to finish. I’m all for meaningless philosophical BS’ing on why the things I like are awesome, but man… If a guy that smart could write such claptrap, it gives me some faith that humanity really is getting smarter with time.
What price fame?
http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/2008/01/14/Britney-Spears-Career-Analysis
I’m not sure that Friedman would have approved bailing out Bear. Brad DeLong says he would have approved it because otherwise the desired currency/deposit ratio would have risen, thus causing a fall in the money supply, which Friedman would not have liked. While this would be true if Bear had been a commercial bank, it was an investment bank, so the logic doesn’t follow.
I don’t believe the total meltdown scenario for the economy implicitly held some Bear bears (but not Krugman, who disavowed the possibility of a Great Depression-like economy).
In relation to the Friedman piece by Mr Goodman, I am amazed that the NY Times can employ someone as their ‘national economics writer’ (not ‘reporter’} who has neither a degree in economics nor any understanding of the subject matter, if this article is any guide.
According to the NY Times website, Mr Goodman has an MA in Asian Studies from Berkeley and spent ten years as the ‘Asian economic correspondent’ for The Washington Post. Neither paper apparently paper sees the need to employ a professional economist to report on the most serious economic issues of the day, whether they are in the US or in Asia.
Here in Australia we have four newspapers with pretensions as quality national dailies. Every one of them has at least one economics reporter and all of these reporters have degrees in economics.
I used to think that employing economists to write intelligently about economics for the masses was nothing out of the ordinary but clearly it is extraordinary at the NY Times (and probably the Washington Post).
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