From the monthly archives:

July 2007

Jacob Levy on Linda Hirshman on John Rawls

July 27, 2007

Please read.

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Dying for Drugs

July 25, 2007

Kerry’s outstanding piece on access to experimental drugs from the August/September issue of Reason is now available online. I think the thing that sets this article apart from typical libertarian FDA hit pieces is the way it so evenhandedly explains the rationale for excluding some dying patients from clinical trials. There is no ideological table pounding. I really [...]

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Why Wait?

July 24, 2007

Matt writes:
Back in December I called my primary care physician’s office to schedule an appointment. I got one in mid-March. Such is life.
Dude! What are you doing? Medics USA on the corner of 17th and P Streets NW. The office will not be featured in Architectural Digest, but the doctors have presciption pads. I’ve always gotten in [...]

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If Warheads Were Dessert, Arms Races Would be Delicious

July 24, 2007

David Brooks once wrote a column based on an astonishing sociological insight seldom noted by teenagers to the effect that not conforming is just another way of conforming when you do it in the way everyone else is doing it, say, by getting a tatttoo. Opting out is hard! Robert Frank noted this dynamic with the bygone multiple [...]

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Yglesias versus Commenters

July 23, 2007

I love it! Matt’s Econ101-disdaining commenters are completely devastating in their muscular deployment of advanced labor economics.
Question for Bryan Caplan: Is there data on the consensus among economists on this one? My guess is: there is.

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Are Our Soldiers Dying in Vain?

July 23, 2007

I think Obama stumbled so badly because he was trying not to utter the stupdity Edwards uttered just after him. For Edwards, I guess, death is never in vain as long as you signed up to follow orders, possibly in completely pointless wars.

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The Passion of Mike Gravel

July 23, 2007

“The only thing worse than a soldier dying in vain is more soldiers dying in vain.”
 And he meant it.
I don’t care what the post-debate polls say about you, Mike Gravel.

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Kerry Howley

July 23, 2007

Obvs. And you should see the hott new haircut.

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Punk Rock Economist

July 23, 2007

This picture of Tyler at the Mars Bar the East Village is awesome. He is more punk rock than any of those guys. Seriously. (Cowen has a tattoo on his mind.) The article is decent, too.

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The Paid Vacation Laffer Curve

July 19, 2007

Yglesias makes a perfectly sound point in this post about paid vacation:
A paid vacation is a kind of accounting fiction — you continue to draw a paycheck (and health care benefits, etc.) even while you’re on vacation. But nobody’s going to pay you to go on vacation. You’re paid for the work that you actually do.The [...]

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The Courage to Conjoin

July 18, 2007

Ramesh Ponnuru writes:
What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism). If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of particles and energy, then all human action must be within the domain of caused events, free [...]

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Angus Deaton’s New Happiness Paper

July 12, 2007

This is an important new paper using the freshest data. Abstract:
During 2006, the Gallup Organization collected World Poll data using an identical questionnaire from national samples of adults from 132 countries. This paper presents an analysis of the data on life-satisfaction (happiness) and health satisfaction and their relationships with national income, age, and life-expectancy. Average [...]

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Money and Status: It Really Is Up to You

July 12, 2007

Ezra likes to caricature my claim about the multidimensional, opt-in/opt-out nature of status races as “the idea that otherwise pathetic people can be really respected in Everquest.” This is, of course, true. And it is also true that you can choose your career, choose where you will live, choose whether to marry, choose whether to have children, choose what [...]

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Relatively Awesome

July 12, 2007

This is the best article I’ve read on the relationship between income, autonomy, status, and happiness. It happens to be from the Onion. Best bit:
Braxton, who earns roughly one-fourth of what the firm’s lowest-seniority full-time employees make, said he has no desire to make his coworkers feel bad about their “boring, shitty lives.”
“If somebody complains about [...]

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Shorter Gerson

July 6, 2007

Virtual worlds like Second Life in which actions can have few irremediable bad consequences surprisingly include zones of anarchic licentiousness. Therefore, real lives of authentic freedom, unspoiled by censorious moralizing scolds like me, cannot have purpose or meaning.
Idiotic column here.

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Cato in Pictures

July 5, 2007

I’m going to Missouri this weekend for my grandma’s 90th birthday, and I thought I’d take some pictures of Cato to prove that I have a real job in an office and everything. I just tried Google’s online photo service, and I think I may like it better than Flickr, except for the fact that [...]

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Independence Day

July 4, 2007

Somehow, we ended up at the White House.

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Libertarian Optimism Bias vs. Statist Pessimism Bias

July 4, 2007

I have a long post up over at Overcoming Bias, which is followed by a super-stimulating and challenging (to me, at least) comments thread.
Bryan Caplan comments at EconLog on the upsides of pessimistic bias.

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Against Patriotism

July 3, 2007

Independence Day generally involves an outpouring of emotion usually described as “patriotism.” In the U.S., this generally involves a characteristic confusion between love of country and love of the principles the country is supposed to embody. I’ve just read George Kateb’s brilliant essay, “Is Patriotism a Mistake?,” from his collection of essays Patriotism and Other Mistakes (the lead essay alone is worth the price [...]

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Silver Foxes Dig the Green

July 2, 2007

I’ve got a new piece at The American on how money saves us from unhappiness in old age. A slice:
Easterlin, a pioneer of the study of happiness in the field of economics, set out to chart the trajectory of happiness over an ordinary person’s life-span. He discovered that, on average, happiness rises slowly from our early twenties, peaks at [...]

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iPhone Blogging

July 1, 2007

Literally. Blogging this on my housemate’s new device. Keyboard is just a little tricky, but mostly it’s transcendentally awesome and I am full of envy.

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