Category: Web/Tech

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…

1. The earthquake that is Germany, Germany is recovering and sustainably

2. The corporate book event is growing

3. Does radio play hurt record sales?  Stan Liebowitz says yes

4. Steven Pinker’s list of dangerous ideas

5. Are bonobos really sweet and playful?

For decades, many of the brightest graduates in economics sought their fortune in finance.  In coming years, they will seek it in marketing, as the Internet gives all companies the information-rich environment once available only in financial markets.

There is much more here; Varian of course is now working full-time for Google.  Thanks to Chris F. Masse for the pointer.

Imagine a full extension of property rights and a closing off of the "commons" problems known as the comments section of a blog.  Marc Andreessen writes:

The first time I met Dave Sifry,
over three years ago, he told me that conversations on the Internet
would eventually all revolve around every individual having a blog,
each individual posting her own thoughts on her own blog, and blogs
cross-linking through mechanisms like trackbacks and blog search
engines (such as Dave’s Technorati).

The advantage of this new world, said Dave, is that each individual
(anonymous or not) would be publicly responsible for their own content
and in charge of their own space — substantially reducing the risk of
spam and trolls — and the communication would flow through the links.
There would still be the risk of link spam, but at least this new world
would make people more responsible for their own content, and that
would tend to uplevel the discourse.

But how will readers know which blogs and which comments to visit?  I fear that tagging (and related acts of evaluation) is an underprovided public good.  How can we compensate effective taggers for their efforts?  And do you not enjoy the weaving back and forth of discussion in a single blog thread?

My prediction of the future equilibrium is…the current equilibrium, like it or not.

Here is an article on the future of search.

While we’re at it, I’ll repeat the norms of this blog: it’s fine to be humorous, but don’t treat the other commenters, or for that matter bloggers, in an insulting manner.

1. Starring us, Alex is (correctly) judged the best dressed.

2. WSJ review of Bryan Caplan

3. Linguistic abilities of the Presidential candidates; lots of Spanish but not just.

4. Half the bottled water in Beijing is fake?

5. Heterodox economics, covered by the NYT; like Don Boudreaux I am still waiting for someone to defend trade barriers across the 50 states.

6. Bet on whether women really do talk more than men

If you’ve ever wanted to remotely access the files on your mac’s hard
drive through the Safari application on your iPhone (and who hasn’t?)
then you’ll want to download Telekinesis from the genius mind behind Quicksilver.

Here is more.  I haven’t tried the download but from appearances it even seems to be one of those free markets with a dollar price of zero…

1. The American Scene, up and running anew

2. Bryan Caplan podcast

3. CEA, part I; CEA part II

…a few weeks ago, Facebook pulled a MySpace-like maneuver.  The site tore down its walls and opened its pages to outside developers.  A new tool kit called Facebook Platform
allows any programmer–a bored student or a multimillion-dollar
corporation–to peel back the site’s breastplate, poke around, and
rearrange the innards.  None of the nearly 900 (and counting) programs
released so far are particularly life-changing–among the most popular
add-ons are a "Graffiti" program (downloaded by more than 3.3 million
people as of this writing) that lets you doodle other people’s profiles
and an "Honesty Box" that lets your friends say, anonymously, what they
really think of you [TC: uh-oh].  Collectively, though, these programs are hugely
significant.  If the site figures out a smart way to deploy these mini
applications, it will be more than just a social network.  Facebook will
turn into a do-everything site with the potential to devour the whole
Internet.

Here is the article.  I’ve now filled out my profile, and even put a picture on it, with Yana’s aid of course.  Since I don’t have the slightest idea what to do with it (will I ever?), I suppose I am not qualified to comment on this interesting hypothesis.  By the way there is also a Facebook group for MarginalRevolution, not set up by me I might add.

1. How to become a cyborg, for real

2. Harry Potter must live! (corrected link here)

3. Charles Koch on The Black Swan

4. Are vouchers working in Washington?

5. James Surowiecki: is the world getting better?

Here, the pointer is from Eduardo Pegurier.

Here is the new WSJ economics blog, pointer from Brad DeLong.