Tyler Cowen takes a premise of Arnold Kling’s: My guess is that most of the younger (aged 30-34) highly-educated folks are children of two highly-educated parents. My guess is that many of the older (aged 55-59) highly-educated folks are children of a college-educated father but not a college-educated mother. I don’t think we have a […]
UPDATE: Brad DeLong lists some of the Usual Suspects who are Not in the Line-up. John McCain’s 300 economists who support his Jobs for America Plan (via Tyler Cowen, non-sociopath, who provides an appropriate context for the list) includes one person, an Ike Brannon, whose affiliation is listed as “Department of the Treasury” and who, […]
For those who don’t want to try to read about John McCain’s 2 – 1 = 7 calculations, a couple of interesting links. It’s missing the appropriate equations, so I suspect a few of the simplifying assumptions are skewed, and he doesn’t mention that the industry in question has always been at the forefront of […]
The Most Trusted Name in News: Former secretaries of state James Baker III and Warren Christopher say the next time the president goes to war, Congress should be required to say whether it agrees. The co-chairmen of a bipartisan study group have proposed legislation that would require the president to consult lawmakers before initiating combat […]
Tim Harford (h/t Mark Thoma) presents the old trade-off between Rationality and Cooperation, with a curious parenthetic: Except, nobody really thinks this is the way players would behave in reality. The optimal strategy seems sociopathic; isn’t it worth playing cooperatively in the hope that the other player will do the same thing? (Unlike much real […]
UPDATE: NYT Obituary here. Some book cover images added. Two years ago at Readercon, I found myself doing some hero-worship in the Green Room. Friday, we had discovered that my piece on Jorge Luis Borges was the first of the appreciations of that year’s Memorial Guest of Honor. (I assume this was because of its […]
Fed values Bear Stearns assets at a level where it has only cost them $100,000nothing—so far. (Indeed, there’s a $50,000 “buffer” left.) Strangely, the scuttlebutt in the market yesterday was that the valuation should be around $24 billion. Or at least that’s how I read this paragraph: If the portfolio’s value were to drop to […]
Barack Obama has been reading the Wall Street Journal.
But it’s difficult to argue with the rest of this piece. Now I qualify as Gloom and Doom member?
Tom’s post yesterday about British housing (following Felix), where the volume was down significantly with the average slightly up, seemed rather intuitive if you buy the argument that the majority of house prices haven’t been cut enough, and won’t sell until they cut more.* But, courtesy of our fellow Gloom-and-Doom maven, Barry Ritholtz at The […]