Category: Web/Tech

I ordered a book from Amazon yesterday morning.  A few hours later I’m sitting at my computer and there is a knock at the door.  I open the door and this girl is standing there and she says "Are you Alex Tabarrok?"  I say yes and she hands me the book.  My jaw just about hits the floor.  I’m totally confused.  The girl runs away laughing.  Only later do I figure it out.  I ordered from Amazon Marketplace.  The seller just happened to live nearby and she brought the book over.  Pretty cool.

1. Profile of Robert Barro, via Mark Thoma

2. In defense of data mining?

3. How do magicians do without intellectual property?  Via Eric Crampton

4. Jason Kottke, one of my favorite bloggers and now a father as well, is up and running again

This is a new economics blog, a successor to the now-defunct MaxSpeak, and it seems to star Barkley Rosser and Michael Perelman, both heterodox economists.

Addendum: Chris Masse points me to Alan Greenspan’s one post blog on Amazon.com, maybe more will follow but I predict not.

1. Who is Thomas Sowell?

2. Imaginary books, not created by us I might add

3. A new economics and food blog, including (but not just) reviews of Baltimore

4. Judy Chevalier’s debut NYT column covers my colleague Thomas Stratmann and GMU graduate student Michael Makowsky

5. Funny classical CD covers

1. Bob Frank lectures at Google

2. The Guardian reviews Discover Your Inner Economist, here; I liked the part when he called it "extraordinary."

3. Markets in everything: wedding apparel, never worn, via Henry Farrell.

4. Why Roberto Bolaño matters

5. What’s wrong with the fair tax? — Addendum: Bartlett’s piecei s now ungated here.

1. John Goodman’s health policy blog

2. "Sworn Virgins": Albanian women pledge eternal virginity for the right to live as a man.  Tell me again what do Albanian men get out of this deal?

3. Frans de Waal responds on bonobos; NSFW!

4. Richard’s rules for restaurant-driven revitalization

5. The economist as serial plagiarist

1. Contrary to popular wisdom, Oscar winners do not live longer; hint: "Write a computer simulation showing why "breaking your hip increases your life expectancy", based on the simplest probability model you can come up with."

2. How race and welfare became connected in the American mind

3. Many thanks, none of you sold me down the river

4. How I would change the rules of the NBA

5. Freakonomics is now a New York Times blog

1. Camille Paglia: save the arts with religion

2. Gayle King flirted with me a lot

3. What’s a nerd anyway?  No way is it, at its core, "a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture…"  Genetics, anybody?

4. Let companies run for electoral office?

5. How are autistic and aspie girls different from the boys?  In the article, Skuse is the guy who nails it.

This is me (more on me) talking with the very smart David Robinson of AEI, find it here.  It is about thirty minutes long, here is their summary.  I recall talking about why blogging should count as scholarship, what’s wrong with food in Sweden, and how my views on elites and voters differ from those of Bryan Caplan, among other topics.

1. How to escape the Japanese liquidity trap

2. Libertarian Alan Bock, of the Orange County Register, is blogging

3. Favorite big band recordings

4. How crooked is the NBA?  Good readings here, here, and here, via Chris Masse.

5. Willem Buiter’s new macro blog, recommended.

Here is Robin on Tyler on Robin. 

I think of Robin as a dominant intellectual presence in my book (can you guess who the other presences are?).  He is the only specific thinker discussed at any length.  That’s conscious choice, not accident.  He also receives part of the dedication at the end.

In some ways I think of the whole book as an (attempted) rebuttal to Robin.  Robin is the rational constructivist, the logical atomist, the reductionist, and the extreme Darwinian.  The Inner Economist is trying to reconcile (modified) economic reasoning and a (modified) version of common sense morality.

But…for the secularist reductionism beckons and seduces.  Imagine an intellectual war with Darwin, Fourier, Comte, early Carnap, David Friedman and millenarian Christian eschatology on one side (that’s my mental image of how Robin maps into the history of ideas), with bits from Henry Sidgwick, Hayek, Quine, and William James on the other side, yet within the framework of modern microeconomics and with ongoing references to the blogosphere.  I am (implicitly) defending gradualism, pluralism, the partial irreduciblity of individual choice, the primacy of civilization, and yes also a certain degree of social artifice.

But can such a defense succeed?

Note that Robin is wrong to suggest I don’t reply to his views.  I paint him
as engaged in a subjective quest — including on bias — rather than standing from an
Archimedean point.  And within the realm of subjective quests, I try to
outline a superior one, especially in the last few chapters of the
book.  He doesn’t like being relativized in this fashion, and that he doesn’t see me as replying to him is itself an indicator of our underlying differences.

Still, I know I have to be afraid of Robin!  Most people who don’t find Robin’s ideas compelling are simply unwilling to face up to the holes in what they believe. 

Wake up, and take at least a sip from the Robin Hanson Kool-Aid.  Life will never be the same again.

And if you can, hire him to write a book for you.

Chris Masse writes:

DO YOU KNOW THE URL OF TYLER COWEN’S SECRET BLOG?? IF YES, PLEASE, SEND ITS URL TO CHRIS MASSE. ANONYMITY GUARANTEED. AND I PROMISE I WON’T PUBLISH IT.

[I’m testing the solidity of the oath taken by the purchasers of
Tyler Cowen’s new book –they had to promise not to give out the URL of
his secret blog to strangers.]

I look forward to Chris’s report…

Addendum: Here is a great post by Kieran.

1. Famous economists ranked by Google Trends

2. Fabio Rojas’s most popular post

3. "Rent-an-American," German style

4. "Feigenbaum did not
actually take the dime out of his briefcase, as it is suspicious to stare
at dimes."

5. Assessment of cap-and-trade proposals

6. Review of Discover Your Inner Economist, from The Washington Post; the reviewer calls it "the most useful of the lot," though he is skeptical about the whole "Freakonomics trend."

Many of your podcasts have been sent off, the rest should follow early in the week to come.  My favorite question was from the guy who asked something like:

One sentence in your post stood out: "I believe this will be fun for me."  Was it?

He also told me it was OK to answer his question last.

If you blog and link to your podcast, please let me know, I’ll try to post a round-up of the links.  But given how personal so many of the questions were, I’m not sure many of you will be putting them up on your blogs…