From the monthly archives:

September 2008

Fail, Baby, Fail

September 15, 2008

I pretty much agree with Nathan Oman:
… I have to confess that the fall of a major financial institution puts me in a down right jaunty mood.
Sure, the markets already have lost 3%, but what makes me happy is the news that Lehman Brothers threw itself at the knees of the Fed and the Treasury [...]

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Hey Kids, Ethanol!

September 15, 2008

In the new edition of Forbes, you can find me arguing for the abolition of the drinking age.

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Stealing from Taxpayers Is the Easiest

September 15, 2008

Last week, Robert Bradley, Jr. wrote a terrific review of T. Boone Pickens’ latest autobiography, The First Billion Is the Hardest. The conclusion, in particular, is right on:
Mr. Pickens’s standing to pronounce on energy matters was earned as a free-market producer. He is now using that standing to defy the market itself.
His arguments for a [...]

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Stay Tuned

September 14, 2008

If you experience technical difficulties, do not panic!

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Moral Paradox with Saul Smilansky

September 14, 2008

On this week’s Free Will, I chat with Saul Smilansky about his new book Ten Moral Paradoxes. This is a really fun, stimulating read.

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An Experiment

September 13, 2008

On my sidebar to the right, there is a sort of cloud/list thing under “Popular Searches.” I take it that the fact that people who search this blog have been searching for “Naomi Klein” more than anything else, indicates more current interest in what I have to say about Naomi Klein than about other topics. [...]

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What Books Would You Ban?

September 13, 2008

If you were in favor of book-banning, and in a position to ban books, what books would you ban?
“I would never ban books” is not an answer to this question. That’s just counterfactual resistance, a distinctive symptom of the intellectual immaturity of beginning philosophy students. “I cannot honestly answer the question because I would not [...]

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War (on Poverty) is Over, If You Want It

September 13, 2008

Please listen to Christian Broda, from this profile in the American :
We are underestimating the gains from trade…The current statistical interpretation ignores the fact that a poor household today can access goods that, in the 1960s, they could not—microwaves, DVDs—and, more importantly, that the prices of the staples that lower-income households consume have also gone [...]

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David Brooks’ Jihad Against Individualism

September 12, 2008

On behalf of America, I am staging an intervention. Country first!
David Brooks is evidently infatuated with the idea that individualism is just downright unscientific. It is more than a bit queer that Brooks uses this alleged Fact of Science to argue that American conservatives ought to purge all remaining vestiges of individualism from its thought [...]

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Can You Use Heroin Responsibly?

September 10, 2008

I think so. So do Earth and Fire Erowid, the lead essayists of this month’s Cato Unbound on “Responsible Drug Use.” Carnegie Mellon’s Jonathan Caulkins is not so sure prohibition is a bad thing. Stay tuned for comments from Reason’s Jacob Sullum and UCLA’s Mark Kleiman.

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Red State, Blue State

September 10, 2008

It’s not too late to register for tomorrow’s Cato book forum on Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Andrew Gelman will be joined by one his co-authors, Boris Shor, with comments from Michael P. McDonald and Brink Lindsey. I’m told C-Span will be recording, so there [...]

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No Bailout for Detroit!

September 10, 2008

Here’s this morning’s Marketplace commentary.
It comes as no surprise that some people in Michigan didn’t like it much. It bears emphasizing that the failure of the iconic American auto firms would be very very far from the demise of the American auto industry. As I mention in the piece, they make Toyota Camrys in Kentucky. [...]

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More on the CPI: The BLS Responds!

September 9, 2008

John Greenlees of the BLS was kind enough to reply by email to my recent post on the CPI, and has agreed to allow me to post his comments:
Thank you for the kind words on your The Fly Bottle blog about my article with Rob McClelland, “Addressing Misconceptions about the Consumer Price Index.”  You also [...]

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With Josh Knobe on Empiricism in Philosophy and Social Science

September 9, 2008

In this week’s Free Will, I chat with Bloggingheads TV’s resident experimental philosopher, Joshua Knobe, about getting out of the armchair and doing philosophy and economics using more direct empirical methods. Among other things, we talk about people’s intuitions about free will and responsibility, the “reverse experience machine,” and other fascinating subjects.
Up next on Free [...]

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No Dice, Pickens!

September 8, 2008

Last Thursday on public radio’s Marketplace Morning Report, Bob Moon interviewed billionaire T. Boone Pickens about his highly self-publicized energy plan, which centers on using wind power to replace a portion of the natural gas used to create electricity, and then using that replaced natural gas to power cars. As it happens, Pickens has invested in [...]

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Cato Book Forum: Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do

September 5, 2008

Attention D.C.-area locals!
This Thursday I’ll be moderating a Cato book forum on Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do by Columbia political scientist and stats wizard (and blogger) Andrew Gelman. Andrew and co-authors David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, and Jeronimo Cortinaare are responsible for the great [...]

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For CPI Geeks

September 5, 2008

If you take pleasure in thinking about economic measurement in general and the Consumer Price Index in particular, I urge you to read this lucid short paper [pdf] by Robert McClelland, Chief of the the Division of Price and Index Number Research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and John S. Greenlees, a research [...]

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Sex, Culture, and Sarah Palin

September 4, 2008

Democratic politics, in the end, is not about rational deliberation. It is about coalitional signaling. It is about expressive solidarity. It is about identity and emotion. That’s why I have a deep mistrust of democratic politics. But I think I’m as attuned to the subrational frequencies of electoral politics as anyone; I just don’t take [...]

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McCloskey on Happiness and Flourishing

September 3, 2008

Speaking of McCloskey, I’m enjoying her response to critics [doc] of Bourgeois Virtues. I’m symapthetic to her position on happiness in this passage:
[Graafland and I] do more sharply disagree that “the goal of virtues is just this: to become happy.”  The Greek word that started the discussion, eudaimonia, is indeed sometime translated erroneously as “happiness,” [...]

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Bourgeois Deeds

September 3, 2008

I just discovered that Deidre McCloskey has posted on her website a draft [doc] of the second volume of her work on bourgeois virtues. For those of us who love the history and anthropology of morality and economic history and rhetoric and political economy, McCloskey’s hard to beat for interestingness value.
HT: David Boaz

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