Occasionally I get jaded and think there won't be a surprising one of these ever again.  But then Allison Kasic comes along and restores my faith in the creativity of humankind.  Here goes:

Mountain climbers. Livestock guarders. Long-range spitters. And now
llamas have a new distinguishing role to add to their resume: golf
caddy. Yes, for $40 the llamas at Sherwood Forest Country Club
will carry your bags, accompany you on a nine-hole run, and maybe even
channel their peaceful temperament into quiet but unwavering moral
support.

There is also a reason on the cost side:

Because of their soft, padded feet, llamas do not make marks on the
green and actually leave the courses with less damage than golf carts.

There is another reason given in the text, which I don't wish to reproduce here.  And it is possible to train them to do this work, or so it is claimed.  Finally:

“Some people have more fun walking the animals around than playing golf,” says Lautenschlager…

Addendum: Via John de Palma, more on llama markets.

The price of corn, for example, is down 56 percent since July 2008 on the Chicago Board of Trade.

Here is more.  I don't in fact think that the financial crisis has improved global welfare.  But we are trained to think probabilistically.  What is the chance that the gains from lower commodity prices — most of all for poor people who buy food — outweigh the losses from the collapse of world trade and lower overall growth?

Just wondering.

Addendum: Here are some related queries.

It's no surprise that people who buy fake merchandise are more likely to cheat in other ways but in this video Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, explains another one of his ingenious experiments.  Ariely was able to show that randomly inducing people to choose or wear fake merchandise can make them significantly more likely to cheat on a subsequent task.  You are what you wear, or another example of the fundamental attribution error.

Hat tip Freakonomics.

Over at CatoUnbound:

Let me mention one other real-world complication that has made it difficult for the Fed to achieve a faster growth of nominal GDP. Macroeconomists often like to think of inflation in terms of an aggregate price index, the variable P in the equation of exchange. But, particularly in the current environment, aggressive stimulus by the Fed is unlikely to show up as higher wages or the prices of most services, but instead would raise relative commodity prices and could in a worst case scenario precipitate a currency crisis, both of which would be highly destabilizing in their own right. I agree with Sumner that the Fed could and should have done more, but would caution that it is also possible for the Fed to try to do too much. I come back to the perspective with which I opened – given the earlier regulatory lapses, significant economic losses could not have been prevented by any monetary policy that could have been implemented in the fall of 2008.

There are many more points of interest in this dialogue and further comments to come.

From Mathias Trabandt and Harald Uhlig, there is a new study:

We characterize the Laffer curves for labor taxation and capital income taxation quantitatively for the US, the EU-14 and individual European countries by comparing the balanced growth paths of a neoclassical growth model featuring “constant Frisch elasticity” (CFE) preferences. We derive properties of CFE preferences. We provide new tax rate data. For benchmark parameters, we find that the US can increase tax revenues by 30% by raising labor taxes and 6% by raising capital income taxes. For the EU-14 we obtain 8% and 1%. Denmark and Sweden are on the wrong side of the Laffer curve for capital income taxation.

I guess some of those countries should cut their tax rates.  The title of the paper is How Far Are We From the Slippery Slope?  The Laffer Curve Revisited.  You'll find some ungated versions here. 

When it comes to the tax code, there is less of a consensus than I had expected to find:

Health insurance receives preferential tax treatment. Should the U.S. change the income tax code so that health insurance benefits are taxed the same as income? Economists lean ever so slightly against this idea–44 percent oppose it, while 42 percent favor it. Should the U.S. amend the income tax code to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction? Again, economists are almost evenly split. Should internet sales be exempted from taxation? The majority of economists (57 percent) say “no,” while less than a quarter favor special treatment of internet-based sales.

That's from a survey of AEA members, conducted by Robert Whaples.  The paper has other results of interest.