From the monthly archives:

April 2007

Everything’s Swimmy in Gay Paree?

April 29, 2007

One of Ezra’s co-bloggers, John, writes:
Mark Weisbrot has a good column explaining that, no, France’s economic problems are no more severe than those faced by any other G8 country, including the US.  At the very least, there’s no convincing evidence that the usual proposed “solution” — more liberalized market reforms — is going to solve [...]

Read the full article →

A Sensible Natalist Proposal

April 28, 2007

If we’re willing to see rates of reproduction as a kind of public good, then why not try to replicate the conditions or yore in which children redounded to their parents’ bottom line. Pass a law that gives parents a claim on some percentage of their children’s future earnings. This will not only increase the [...]

Read the full article →

Why Americans Breed

April 27, 2007

Nicholas Eberstadt’s American Interest article on American demographic exceptionalism is a great antidote to the badly undermotivated worry that America has lost its animal spirits and assimilationist mojo. His conclusion:
U.S. demographic exceptionalism is not only here today; it will be here tomorrow, as well. It is by no means beyond the realm of the possible [...]

Read the full article →

Rodrik on Procedural Fairness and Trade

April 26, 2007

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has joined the blogosphere. Welcome! I’m glad, because he seems like a thinker well worth disagreeing with. For instance, in this post on why people get riled by economic dislocations caused by trade, but not by technology, Rodrik writes:
[Economists conventionally] do not ask whether the trade opportunity involves an exchange that [...]

Read the full article →

Howley Kills

April 25, 2007

Kerry Howley, my treasured confidant and primary oxytocin source, was awesome on Red Eye last night.
She always does her makeup like that.

Read the full article →

Unending Happiness

April 25, 2007

If you’re tired of reading about happiness, maybe you’d like to hear me talk about it. Here’s my appearance on Counterpoint for ABC National Radio (that’s Australia) with presenter Michael Duffy, and my latest Cato podcast with Anastasia Uglova.
If you’re not tired of reading about happiness, here are my contributions to the current Cato Unbound [...]

Read the full article →

Do We Have a Duty to Breed?

April 18, 2007

Commenting on Tyler Cowen’s post reporting on Hans Peter-Kohler’s paper [pdf] on the the effect of children on subjective well-being, Ross Douthat (subbing for Andrew Sullivan) writes:
Europe seems to have this pretty well figured out. And I don’t mean to be flip — the European “let’s stop at one” approach to childbearing really is [...]

Read the full article →

Wilkinson Sightings

April 17, 2007

My contribution to the Cato Unbound issue on happiness is now online.
I appear today on Bloggingheads TV with Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber and George Washington University (we know which affiliation is important).
And I was interviewed last night for Counterpoint with Michael Duffy on ABC (Australia) Radio. The show plays every Monday. I think [...]

Read the full article →

In Pursuit of Happiness Research: Is It Reliable? What Does It Imply for Policy?

April 11, 2007

That’s the name of my long-awaited (by me, at least) Cato Policy Analysis, published today. Here’s the abstract:
“Happiness research” studies the correlates of subjective well-being, generally through survey methods. A number of psychologists and social scientists have drawn upon this work recently to argue that the American model of relatively limited government and a dynamic [...]

Read the full article →

DMU in an MRI

April 4, 2007

From Scientific American:
By measuring response time, the researchers got a sense of how quickly people learned which one of the abstract pictures indicated money would follow. They noticed an inverse correlation between how much money a person had (assets and income) and the swiftness with which they were conditioned. The poorer people tended to figure [...]

Read the full article →

America Should Be More Like a Single-Minded Firm Devoted to Killing People

April 3, 2007

I found Robert Wright’s NYT op-ed in praise of the Army both chilling and revelatory. Here’s the core sentiment of the article:
[T]he whole, larger stereotype — that the military is a right-wing institution, best viewed with skepticism if not cynicism by the left — is way off. Growing up in, or at least amid, the [...]

Read the full article →

Leonhardt Attack

April 3, 2007

I pile on David Leonhardt’s nonsensical review of Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism over at Cato@Liberty.

Read the full article →