1. Gelman criticizes Levitt on drunk driving; Jeff Ely chimes in here.
2. A new method for measuring earthquakes, tweets per minute.
3. Political souvenirs, from Italy.
4. Wavvves is my favorite popular music album this year, except it isn't popular.
5. Germans are happier if they earn less than their neighbors.
6. Peter Thiel's favorite thinker is Rene Girard.
7. Yegor Gaidar passes away at 53.
8. Policy communicators essay contest for $15,000.
Is the Wavvves comment some sort of sarcasm I’m not hip enough to understand?
Listening to those songs makes me feel like an old person complaining about how that newfangled rock music is just a bunch of loud noise. Kids these days.
Let me save anyone who wants to read Superfreak several hours:
1) Standard condoms are too large for Indian men
2) There were more casualties in the US Army during some years in the late 70′s/early 80′s than during the worst year of the Iraq war.
Wavves! They’re pretty good but I think No Age is way, way better. I actually liked Wavves more than No Age until I saw them both in concert, and something about No Age suddenly clicked. Then even listening to the CDs, I found No Age more to my liking…it’s strange how that happens. See them live if you get the chance.
I’m shocked by the wavves choice, too. But if you’re interested in noisy/catchy/arty music you should try Micachu. I’m enjoying it more than I did the wavves album initially. favorite track of the year… either that track by kuneck or that track by the whites boy alive…
Big surprise w/the Wavvves pick…the listenable parts are excellent, but too few for my liking.
I gotta say for #1 I dont trust anyone that says this with a strait face
“I have to admit that I’ve never been drunk,”
Germans are happier if they earn less than their neighbors
Does it sound better if you say “Germans are happier if their neighbors earn more than they do”?
That is in fact the phrasing of the referenced article: “That this is the case suggests that people significantly benefit from living in a good neighbourhood”.
I bet that few Germans would agree with the proposition “If all of your neighbors earn X you would prefer to earn 0.8 X rather than X”, but that many would agree with “If you earn X you would prefer that your neighbors earn 1.2 X rather than X.”
Most recently, Gaidar has been the Russian economist most vigorously arguing that the
ups and downs of both the Soviet and Russian economies are/were best understood by
looking at what oil prices were doing, with the appearance of economic decline after
1986 being due to the decline of oil prices that year.
“HEY MR. COWEN! Double cheeseburger meal” (youtube, at exactly 2:00).
Tyler’s secret intertwined music and food vices are becoming clear. And it’s not a pretty picture…
On the drunk driving issue, it has always seemed to me that drunk drivers are more likely to kill someone else (like, say, a drunk walker) than to die themselves in a collision. The emphasis on the safety of the drunk driver when comparing driving to other options seems badly misplaced from the start.
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