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It's tornado season here in Ohio.
This afternoon as a few funnel clouds were forming miles from my house, I received a call from my mother living in Florida. Seems she was not about to wait for her son to make his yearly Mother's Day call as she had urgent [...]
From the Freakonomics blog:
In bad times, when the opportunity cost of time is reduced, the total price of an afternoon at the ballpark is lower for many people than it is when jobs are more plentiful. I see this in my own planning. Though I like baseball, I haven’t been to an [...]
Cross-posted at TSE
This morning's Kansas City Star has an interesting piece on the new frontier of doping: gene doping. The whole article is worth a read, but here are the opening paragraphs.
Scientists have seen the future of sport. It involves mice that can lift three times the average, humans who [...]
The run-up in the world price of oil during the past several years, and especially the rapid climb during the last few weeks to over $120 per barrel, has fueled predictions that the price will reach $200 a barrel in the rather near future. Such predictions are not based [...]
As Becker explains, we cannot predict the future price of oil. But it is unlikely to rise in the foreseeable future to $200 a barrel, especially if we think in inflation-adjusted terms. Oil prices in real terms have fluctuated a great deal. In December 2007 dollars the price of oil [...]
This morning's Kansas City Star has an interesting piece on the new frontier of doping: gene doping. The whole article is worth a read, but here are the opening paragraphs.
Scientists have seen the future of sport. It involves mice that can lift three times the average, humans who can [...]
Daniel Drezner via MR:
10) You get to pig out. More attractive professors tend to do better in student evaluations and other metrics to rate professors. This is not surprising -- after all, the attractive receive a similar dividend across professions.
There's no rank beyond full professor, however. So, that's [...]
David Uren highlights the private sector offset to increased public sector saving:
there is a good body of academic research showing that savings decisions by government and individuals are inversely related—that increases in government surpluses are financed, at least in part, by consumers running down their savings.
The [...]
Just as The Economist predicted, social networks are starting to open up their services to outsiders, to provide something like a “social operating system” for the wider web. Competition between social networks is driving this. The leader this time was MySpace, which announced a data availability initiative (couldn’t [...]
Some more econ blogs newly added to my directory:
EconomistMom.com: A place where analytical rigor meets a mother’s intuition.
Exuberant Rationality: Political and economic commentary by Jesse Zinn, a grad student at UC Santa Barbara.
Digital Audio Insider: A blog by David Harrell about the economics of digital [...]
[...]
A few weeks ago, we discussed the Clay Shirky's concept of cognitive surplus.
Here's the original video of that discussion:
It was funny, I recently did a sort of "career day" thing for some local college kids, talking to them about what pro blogging serious online journalism in the blog format is all about. It was pretty cute and the kids had some interesting questions. One concerned pay, and how [...]
Even if you could argue that there's no value in public prediction markets, it's hard to see what value there is in banning them, or pushing them into the farthest recesses of the law. Not that anything is likely to change soon, but the small CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) [...]
First a merger, then a demerger
The constant boasting about synergy and enhanced market power that accompany any merger or acquisition is just talk. There are other reasons for such deals, including the financial advantage of the principals, the megalomania of a CEO, the fact that M&A is easier than [...]
The other day, I said I was bullish on e-commerce startups, as I suspect that there's been a dearth of innovation in this sector: Amazon has been unassailed for too long, and surely there's more to winning the game than low prices and big selection... right? I listed a [...]
To the extent that the EU was able to cobble together a single position on the Serbian election, it was clear that they wanted President Boris Tadic’s Coalition for a European Serbia to do well — hence the offers of an Association agreement during the election campaign and the [...]
To be honest, I'm surprise that Hillary Clinton's riffing on this famous statement (originally pertaining to the holocaust) hasn't gotten more attention. I just heard about it today reading The Economist on the train:
In Mrs. Clinton’s version, she intoned: “They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They [...]
Apropos yesterday's post about the way the internet has changed the discovery of new music (for the worse!), I wonder: what has happened to regional band clusters and their sound? Back in the day, you knew certain cities had their sound. The Boston sound, the LA sound, the Gainesville sound, [...]
One of the things I try to do with the site is maintain a high level of discourse between myself and the readers. As the traffic to the site has ramped up, we have attracted more political wankers, trolls, asshats than is conducive to intelligent conversation.
This post is a [...]
People are saying that Hillary is "race-baiting" [...]
Apparently they had to kick out the dad of some American Idol contest from backstage because he was causing problems. If someone could explain the scandal to me I'd appreciate it:
Despite a warning, Jeff Archuleta insisted on altering "Stand by Me," [...]
One of my and Russ's impressive young colleagues, Pete Leeson, has his research discussed in today's edition of the Boston Globe. (HT Pete Boettke)
Leeson makes clear that pirates on the high-seas evolved their own social order, one that makes good sense from the perspective of positive economics. Here's a [...]
