Muhanad Talib, a Sunni Muslim, married his Shiite bride because she was a "suitable woman" for him. It also didn't hurt that their vows made them eligible for a $2,000 payout from the government.

Talib and his wife are among more than 1,700 newlywed couples who have accepted cash from a government program that encourages Sunnis and Shiites to tie the knot.

It's encouraging that according to the AP story such marriages are on the rise and the money seems to be treated more like a bonus than a compensating differential for risk.

Hat tip to Daniel Lippman.

Don Boudreaux, chair of the GMU econ department, comments on this sign of the times:

…Uncle Sam is on the verge of paying the City of Los Angeles $30 million to subsidize a ten-year run of Cirque du Soleil. 

So it's finally come to pass – America has embarked on the same road down which ancient Rome marched to its ruin: Uncle Sam not only subsidizes bread (by subsidizing wheat production) but now also circuses.

Andrew Gelman offers some good advice on writing up your results for a research paper: 

1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you've found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you'll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you're talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you'll need to give. 

2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 

3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings.

4. Now go back and write the literature review and the introduction.

5. Moving forward one last time: go to your results and conclusions and give alternative explanations. Why might you be wrong? What are the limits of applicability of your findings? What future research would be appropriate to follow up on these loose ends?

6. Write the abstract. An easy way to start is to take the first sentence from each of the first five paragraphs of the article. This probably won't be quite right, but I bet it will be close to what you need.

7. Give the article to a friend, ask him or her to spend 15 minutes looking at it, then ask what they think your message was, and what evidence you have for it. Your friend should read the article as a potential consumer, not as a critic. You can find typos on your own time, but you need somebody else's eyes to get a sense of the message you're sending.

Bottom line?  Readers are "potential consumers," make it easy for them to buy.  And don't think that marketing is below you.  It isn't.  Marketing can expand the market for what is profound and deep as well as for what is fun.  

From a very good piece in the NYTimes on lobbying:

One of the largest sources of campaign contributions to Senate Democrats during this year’s health care debate is a physician-owned hospital in one of the country’s poorest regions that has sought to soften measures that could choke its rapid growth.

According to the Times, the hospital has been quite successful in its efforts.  And where is this powerful hospital with all the lobbying money located?  Why in the metropolitan area of McAllen, Texas.  McAllen, Texas?   Hmmm…now where I have heard that name before? 

Keep this in mind when you hear promises of Medicare savings from Washington.

On the way up, bubbles encourage excessive investment in the bubble sector.  On the way down a bursting bubble can create wealth shocks, liquidity shortages, and balance-sheet death-spirals.  For both of these reasons, it would be good to be able to identify and pop bubbles.  Identifying bubbles isn't easy, however, because, especially when interest rates are low, prices can increase rapidly with small, rational changes in investor expectations.  But the difficulty of identifying bubbles is reasonably well known.  What I think may be less appreciated is that bubbles are hard to pop even when you know that they exist.

In the lab we can create artificial assets with known dividend streams and thus known fundamental values.  Since Vernon Smith's classic experiments (JSTOR), we know that even in these cases efficient markets fail and bubbles are common.  Bubbles occur even as uncertainty about the fundamental value diminishes (JSTOR).  We also know that once a bubble starts it's difficult to stop.  Circuit breakers and brokerage fees (transaction taxes), for example, don't do much to stop bubbles (see King, Smith, Williams, and Van Boening 1993, not online.)  Investor education doesn't help (for example telling participants about previous bubbles doesn't help). Even increasing interest rates doesn't do much to stop a bubble already in progress and may increase volatility on net.

Futures markets (JSTOR) and short selling do tend to dampen but not eliminate bubbles, thus, there is a case for expanding futures markets in housing and making short selling easier (not harder!).

Bubbles are also less common with more experienced traders – this is one of the strongest findings.  Don't get too excited about this, however, it's experience with bubbles that counts not just trading experience.  I once asked Vernon, for example, how the lab evidence generalized to the larger economy.  In particular, I asked whether 3 bubble experiences in the lab–the number which seems to be necessary to dampen bubbles–might translate to 3 big bubbles in the real world such as the dot com, commodity and housing bubbles (rather than to experience with your run of the mill bubble in an individual stock).  He thought that this was a reasonable inference from the evidence.  Thus we may not see too many big bubbles during the trading lifetime of current market participants but experience is a very costly teacher.  Can we do better?

The last factor that does seem to make a difference is that bubbles liftoff and reach higher peaks when there's a lot of cash floating around.  In theory, this shouldn't matter, fundamental value is fundamental value. If an asset is worth $10 in expected value then it's worth $10 whether you have $20 in your pocket or $200.  But in practice bubbles are bigger when cash relative to asset value is high.

Note that the latter experiments are consistent with the Fed having a significant role in bubble inflation (a theory I have not pushed).  In other words, rather than identifying and popping bubbles already on the rise, not blowing bubbles in the first place may be easier and more productive.   

This comment from Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winner, hugely popular New York Times columnist, and important media star, says more about the state of the economy and newspapers than anything else I have seen to date:

Comments here are moderated; the Times doesn’t have anyone to moderate them on weekends, and I can only do so much myself.

In his recent post on health care and insurance Paul Krugman writes:

[Insurance companies] try to avoid covering people who
are actually likely to need care.

If insurance companies do avoid covering people who are
"likely to need care," this suggests that the uninsured are
unhealthy.  But 60% of the uninsured are in excellent health
(Table 10) (In fact, overall the uninsured are only slightly less healthy than the insured).

To be sure, this doesn't mean that being uninsured is not a problem
but, contra Paul, it does mean that insurance companies would be
willing to cover most of the uninsured at the same rates as the insured
if the uninsured could or would pay those rates. In Paul's story there is a market failure, in the latter story health insurance is expensive and some people don't buy it.  The difference matters because the wrong diagnosis will almost surely lead to the wrong treatment.

Addendum: McArdle nicely takes the time to follow the logic.

Hat tip to Boing Boing.  Do note the name of the company.

Daniel Akst has some good questions:

It's illegal in this country to buy or sell organs for transplant. This is an unjust law made and enforced by people who desperately need neither organs nor money. It condemns kidney-disease sufferers to death and potential organ donors to poverty. It's a law that I will unhesitatingly break if one of my children needs a kidney, and I hope you will have the decency to do the same if a member of your family is in a similar situation.

…The unearned piety of those who condemn these transactions strikes me as outrageous. If someone has the right to abort her own fetus, why does she not have the right to sell her own kidney? By what authority does the state tell me I cannot save myself or my family members by paying money I earned to a willing seller of a surplus item?