Childrens’ Day And The UN Convention On The Rights Of Children Associated with the UN Convention on the Rights of Children is a Universal Childrens’ Day. It is November 20, the date that in 1959 the UN adopted the first version of the Convention, which had 10 articles. It is celebrated in many nations, but […]
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child After Peter Dorman’s latest post this seems appropriate to follow up. Very recently I was at a talk where somebody spoke on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. A theme of the talk was how few Americans know about this UN Convention while […]
Trump Has Birth Nations Skipping Generations Starting around 2011 or so, Donald Trump began to get a lot of attention on the looney racist right in the US by becoming one of the leading advocates of birtherism, the claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii. Of course, Obamam’s father was born […]
Thinking About Generations Three weeks ago my wife and our daughter and I were in Moscow to celebrate her mother’s 90th birthday (which was on March 10). Somehow when I woke up today it occurred to me that a man born on the same day could have joined the Soviet army and participated in the […]
Maybe No Conspiracy Or Coordination, But Lots And Lots Of Collusion Trump and his supporters have been loudly claiming that the Barr letter about the Mueller report has shown “no collusion!” which has been shouted loudly from the rooftops, with many supposedly respectable sources such as the New York Times agreeing with this assessment, thus […]
Alan Krueger And Happiness It took awhile for me to remember after his apparent suicide that the late Alan Krueger was the coauthor of what I consider to be the best paper published on happiness economics, “Develpments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2006, 20(1), 2-24, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/08953300677 . (I apologize if that […]
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Turns 100 Years Old On the forthcoming March 24. This last of the Beat Poets, who founded and still owns both the City Lights bookstore and the associated City Lights press, which legally overcame an effort in 1956 to prevent him from publishing Allen Ginsberg’s poem, _Howl_, he is not only alive and […]
The Lordstown Effect Late last week, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) announced that he will not run for president in 2020, declaring that he would prefer to stay in the Senate to criticize President Trump and support whomever the Dems nominate against Trump. He had been highly praised by various commentators, including Chris Matthews, and even […]
Is Russia Becoming A Neo-Socialist NEP Economy? Probbly not, but there has been some movement in that direction. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was the Socviet system in the 1920s after the WarCommunism period and before Stalin imposed command central planning as well ass full state ownership of the means of production, classsic socialism. The […]
Visa Restrictions And Intellectual Degradation I am in New York attending the Eastern Economic Association meetings. I was in an agent-based modeling session in which two partticipants participated by internet because they were both refused visaas to enter the US. One was from Turkey, which I think is under strict review by the current administration. […]