1. Is the Volcker Rule simply a bad idea?
2. The blog of Simon Wren-Lewis.
3. The price-quality gradient for hamburgers.
4. Profile of Jonathan Haidt, one of the titans.
5. Robert Trivers (another one of the titans) has a blog post.
6. Good Kaufmann poll of what economics bloggers think (pdf).
Hamburgers: The problem is there’s less very little agreement over what makes a good hamburger. The linked story holds that Shake Shack makes a mediocre burger while In N Out makes a great one. I’ve had both and prefer the Shake Shack variety. I’ve seen professional critics ranking those two chains, 5 Guys and a perhaps a few others conclude likewise. Thus the chart is kind of useless.
>>> there’s less very little agreement over what makes a good hamburger<<<
Isn't that pretty much the story of all food? Critics can never agree what's a good pizza, donut, steak, fries, brats and most everything I can think of.
So according to the bundle rating: if 10 people are regulars at a particular place, and no one else goes there, the place gets a high rating. But if another place has the same 10 regulars, but also 1000 tourists coming through every day, that place will get a lower rating. I think the bundle method is flawed.
not to mention the bundle rating, such as it is, is a poor proxy for hamburger quality for restaurants that are not exclusivly burger joints. Are those Minetta Tavern enthusiests really all comming back again and again for the $26 burger?
Hamburgers.
Completely worthless article.
Whether you like them or not, you need to put McDonalds (including the $1 burger) on the chart.
In-n-Out Burger has 280 locations.
Smashburger has 200+ and not a mention.
Five Guys Burgers and Fries has 500+ and not a mention.
The burgers at Michael Jordan’s were awful – explains why they closed. Ed Debevic’s is still worth the trip. Portillo’s is good.
I think a burger is definitely a price/quantity combination. Some days I want a Big Mac. Other days I want a good sirloin burger on a toasted bun at a fantastic greasy spoon diner.
5. Mobile, liberal, and more anonymous societies tend to reward short-term social strategies, while more tight-knit traditional societies reward long-term relationship buliding more than opportunism.
Short term strategies include aggression and inflated self-esteem; long term strategies are more about reliability and humility. There’s a reason why the “self-esteem movement” took off where and when it did.
Yea. Who wouldnt prefer a tight knit traditional society like Pakistan over hellholes like Canada.
Might want to proof your Question results there on page 10 Tyler.
“Bloggers are divided, with many (40
percent) believing it is long overdue,
another 40 percent believing it is
irrelevant, and 36 percent believing it
will have unintended consequences.”
I guess %s don’t have to add up to 100, presuming that the question allowed multiple responses. However, in this case it’s not clear whether no response is valid, if it was indeed presented as check all that apply. In all, it’s not clear what results the survey returned.
The chart is certainly wrong, since the line for “irrelevant” is labeled 40%, but only goes up to 18% or so.
It’s an irrelevant, long-overdue, good to great idea.
Thanks for the catch, bleh. The editing error is my fault, not Tyler’s. I will get a fix ASAP.
5. How odd that Japan is used to show that income equality matches low self inflation but he does not note that China (with high income inequality — and formal measures even understate this) also has low self-inflation. The author doesn’t seem to observe that his earlier fact — NE Asians have lower self inflation are all over the map in terms of income inequality. Furthermore, I would bet that Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese always had lower self inflation than Americans even when their different countries were going through diff experiences of income inequality (Tigers with high income inequality prior to 1960s lower later, China with more formal equality under Mao, less so today). This suggests that something about “culture” dominates income inequality.
You obviously haven’t met the Chinese “fu er dai” or rich second generation.
Google “My father is Li Gang”
From the department of messenger shooting
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/02/01/2618716/blaming-the-messenger-greeces.html
Blaming the messenger: Greece’s chief statistician under fire
‘He’s been accused of exaggerating Greece’s deficits in a conspiracy to strengthen the hand of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund’
Wasn’t Argentina doing something similar?
I think Haidt’s dimensions of morality are very useful and he does a great service in pointing out to liberals (and libertarians, too) that societies that put a lot of weight on the traditional moral dimensions of ‘purity’ and ‘authority’ are more common. That said, I’m not sure he has really helped in explaining why there are differences in weighting. So, for example, the incest example in the article does tickle my ‘disgust’ sensors as do various other kinds of sexual practices, but I don’t think that those disgust reaction should have anything to do with morality (or law) I support gay marriage but would have absolutely no use for gay porn. Conservatives, though, think that disgust -> morality -> law. My differences with conservatives don’t seem to have to do with moral ‘taste buds’ or weighting of factors, but rather a philosophical belief about what connection there should be between intuitive feelings of disgust, morality, and law.
Could you clarify? What do you mean by -> when you write: “conservatives think that disgust -> morality -> law” — is this symbol meant to signify causality (i.e., that morality emerges out of disgust)?
Sorry read -> as ‘implies’. Disgusting implies immoral which implies there ‘oughta be a law’…in the conservative mind. It’s not that liberals and libertarians don’t have the same disgust reaction to, say, the idea of having sex with a dead chicken and then cooking & eating it (another of Haidt’s examples), it’s just that we don’t think this is immoral or that there should be a law against it (it would be gross, but nobody’s being harmed). The difference, it seems to me, is not in the disgust reaction (which is shared), but in the thinking about what (if anything) that implies in terms of law and morality.
Okay thanks — I see.
Interestingly, FWIW, Martha Nussbaum (liberal titan, if you will) argues that disgust itself isn’t natural, but socially constructed. Or more specifically that it should be socially constructed so we’re not disgusted by things like homosexuality that people should have the right to engage in. It’s a contentious argument, as she holds that our most (seemingly) deep and heartfelt emotions — like disgust — and responses are the product not of something like evolution but of socialization.
How is that a contentious argument? just because you may not like the fact that what you find disgusting was taught to you by your family does not make it contentious.
Does Simon Wren Lewis know what ‘counterfactual’ means? I wonder. He wrote: “If the argument assumes that, despite the zero bound, monetary policy can do all that is required, then this should be said so explicitly, because it is somewhat counterfactual.” He seems to want the reader to think counterfactual means unsupported by the facts, but that isn’t what he actually wrote, and that it isn’t what is actually true.
The claim that monetary policy is effective despite the zero bound is a counterfactual quite simply because no one has never observed monetary policy at the zero bound–hint, the one rate model is not complete, most importantly because of expectations and secondarily because of the yield-curve, and tertiary because the interest rate channel is not the only transmission mechanism.
More directly, it seems pretty clear we are not in a liquidity trap. When the Fed loosens (e.g., announces new QE or additional commitment to easy money) inflation accelerates. When the Fed tightens (announces the end of QE or reiterates its plans to tighten soon) inflation decelerates. Talk about a shell-game. The burden is on Wren-Lewis to show use monetary policy is ineffective, not the other way around.
It would have been more accurate to call the study “What libertarian economist bloggers think”. Where are Krugman and DeLong? And how in the world did Megan McArdle get included as an economist? She has a degree in English and an MBA from Chicago..oh, wait, I know…
What? That’s she’s a woman? Shame on you Tom.
No, not what I was getting at.
the comment about “balanced and largely non-partisan identification of respondents” (presumably on the basis that most of them aren’t registered members of the major US political parties; like many other well-known moderates throughout history such as Marx and Mises) made me snigger.
when 28% of your blogger sample want to see Mises “become accepted practice for monetary policy makers” you know it isn’t very representative of a typical group of economists
The real bias problem is that there is a 17:10 ratio of democrats to republicans. I just want to know how much the DNC sent Kaufman’s way. If only they could have replaced those partisan 27% with a few more nice, non-partisan libertarian economists, this survey could be of some use.
If they wanted to stick to the 2 party system, it’s would be more reasonable to ask which party’s candidates they support or vote for most often.
4. I object to this statement: “His previous book, The Happiness Hypothesis, trekked through centuries of philosophy and science in a quest for the secret to well-being. (Bottom line: relationships… :”
“Relationships” was just one idea among ten in THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS.
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