Category: Uncategorized

1. World’s first Cornish pasty museum opens in Mexico.

2. Circa 2009, world’s #1 party school winner.

3. Markets in everything, regulatory arbitrage edition.

4. Nonetheless, you still should follow Justin Wolfers.

5. What happens next in the NBA?

6. Krugman vs. Summers.

1. Habibi, by Craig Thompson.  I don’t enjoy most graphic novels, but this is my favorite of the ones I’ve read.

2. Roger Farmer, “The Stock Market Crash of 2008 Caused the Great Recession: Theory and Evidence.”  I don’t agree with every part of the model, but it focuses our attention on what has become the #1 question of the American macroeconomy: to what extent can a boost in nominal flow make up for a shortfall in wealth?

3. Robert Levine, Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back.  An important book in cultural economics, this clear, energetically written tract is perhaps the best critique of where our culture is at today.  It’s about parasitism more generally, not just copyright violation.  Everyone who follows cultural economics should read this book.

4. Robert L. Bradley, Jr. Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies, home page here.  The second part of a three-volume series on the history of American energy, told through the distinction between productive and predatory capitalism.  Bradley is a very much underrated economic historian, largely because of his “amateur” status, but there is a remarkable amount of learning in his books..

5. Douglas A. Irwin, Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s, self-recommending.  Another new and self-recommending book is Mark Miller’s Salsas of the World, he is one of my cooking and restaurant heroes.

1. The Leijonhufvud-Clower corridor, as experienced in the Greek bookselling market.

2. Eleven facts about the Icelandic book market, via Literary Saloon, and Icelandic capital controls.

3. “The Right to be Lazy,” a view from the Left, circa 1883, recommended by Chris Bertram, and how to revive the Plains.

4. The culture that is Montgomery County: let’s make big box stores negotiate with the community.

5. New claims about Shakespeare.

Why hire someone to do your gambling for you?  This report is from Singapore:

A hard day’s work for Bangladeshi construction worker Salim used to mean toiling under the burning sun. But nowadays, at least once a week, he finds himself assigned to a very different kind of ‘job’ – playing the jackpot machines in the cool air-conditioned comfort of Resorts World Sentosa.

The 29-year-old is one of a number of foreign employees being sent to the casino to gamble on behalf of their employers to feed their own habit, a Straits Times investigation has found.

Five bosses – some with exclusion orders against them – told The Straits Times that they have been handing workers cash, notebooks and mobile phones, then dispatching them to the casino. They claimed to know several other employers doing the same thing.

The ‘proxy gamblers’, dressed mostly in company polo T-shirts and jeans, get a cut of the winnings, but if they lose too much, their pay is docked.

The link is here (part of the article is gated), and for the pointer I thank Daniel Riveong.

1. Dwolla, credit card killer (?), twenty-five cents per transaction.

2. The Invisible Wink.

3. Liquidity premium exceeds carrying costs, photo, or is it the other way around?

4. What is peacekeeping good for? (pdf)

5. There is no great stagnation.

6. EFSF buying up its own bonds, not a good sign.

What does it take to be a Victoria’s Angel?:

She sees a nutritionist, who has measured her body’s muscle mass, fat ratio and levels of water retention. He prescribes protein shakes, vitamins and supplements to keep Lima’s energy levels up during this training period. Lima drinks a gallon of water a day. For nine days before the show, she will drink only protein shakes – “no solids”. The concoctions include powdered egg. Two days before the show, she will abstain from the daily gallon of water, and “just drink normally”. Then, 12 hours before the show, she will stop drinking entirely.

“No liquids at all so you dry out, sometimes you can lose up to eight pounds just from that,” she says.

The pointer is from Mocost on Twitter.

Much like a human athlete who must be a citizen of a country for a required period of time before representing that country in the Olympics, a similar rule applies to horses.

The link is here, hat tip to Michelle Dawson.

p.s. I believe horse nationalism is silly.

We find that regions with higher taxes were less likely to try witches and that the rise of the fiscal state across much of France during the mid-seventeenth century can account for much of the subsequent decline in witch-trials. These results are robust across a range of different econometric specifications and our findings are supported by additional historical and qualitative evidence.

That is from my colleagues Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama, paper here, Suzy Khimm summary here.  And how so?:

Johnson and Koyama argue that regions with lower taxes had less resources to strictly administer legal codes, allowing the trying of witches to flourish. They further note that as France became more unified and its fiscal functions centralized, witch hunts declined just about everywhere. That, however, was not a product of higher taxes but rather of standardization.

1. Peak travelers checks.

2. Via Kottke, Kubrick movies, great bargain.

3. Dallas Symphony to go the route of Greece.

4. Hanson blogs Brooks on inequality.

5. Seeing no evil on the eurozone (John Kay said more or less the same in 2006), and Matt Yglesias is moving to Slate.com, congratulations to him!

1. Why you should visit Morocco (it’s always Tagine o’clock).

2. Argentina may face 70 percent chance of recession.

3. From IHS, www.theihs.org/hsf, Humane Studies Fellowships, application discount with code HSF25MR.

4. “I do kind of want to get maced” or, a behavioral theory of college and its effects.

5. Good, biting review of the new Niall Ferguson book, with one or two major lapses, Ferguson response at the end of it.

6. Spain is doing better than Italy.

1. Leg hair font.

2. Interview with Price Fishback, and In Praise of Eddie Murphy.

3. The smartest thing any Presidential candidate has said this season.

4. The McRib as arbitrage?

5. On which indicators is Italy failing?: governance.  How quickly can you fix that?  And how much are U.S. banks exposed?  What did Roubini say in 2006?

1. Being and Daddylonglegs (German video), and video of Scott Sumner, and video of the excellent Charles Mann.

2. Cormac McCarthy’s Yelp reviews (is it really him?).

3. The lost decade in pumpkin-throwing.

4. Bionic legs for sale.

5. Why so many female CEOs in Brazil?

6. Interfluidity and also Paul Krugman on stagnationist ideas and negative real rates of return; Krugman gives an Old Keynesian, anti-China spin to the argument.