Sunday assorted links

1. “…we find that the real price of watches in nearly all categories falls steadily by 1.3 per cent per year, equivalent to a fall of 75 per cent over a century, showing that sustained innovation in the production of a highly complex artefact had already appeared in one important sector of the British economy by the early eighteenth century.”  Here is the article.

2. Have tasting menus become too expensive?  I say yes: ““It means D.C. is a town that has come of age, and that should worry us all.”

3. Garett Jones argues for a high-SAT immigration policy.

4. How to store your butterflies (photo).

5. My former student, Dr. Yonas Biru, who did his dissertation on the coup d’etat, is on a hunger strike.

6. Interview with Decius.  Caveat emptor, I say he has been “played” by Trump.  Still, the media of so much coverage of the “hillbilly” and “downtrodden” Trump supporters, I say let’s look at the intellectuals, anonymous though some of them may be.

7. Weiner is a splendid movie with many subtle points, including in the philosophical direction.  It is about leadership, publicity, motivation, compulsion, and what a marriage really consists of, or not.  In another life, Huma Abedin could have been a movie star.  She has exactly the right mix of distance and involvement, and she dominates every scene she is in, even when just sitting quietly in the background.  Um…I guess she is a movie star.  Starlet.  Whatever.