Paul Samuelson On Knut Wicksell Something I have been doing for several years now is serving as Senior Coeditor of the Fourth Edition of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, with the original one published back in 1894 in London (my coeditors are Matias Vernengo and Esteban Perez). As part of this effort, a multi-year […]
If Barkley is writing about it, it warrants space on AB. RIP Sharon L. O’Hare, Econospeak, Barley Rosser I know, I know, my part of this blog is increasingly resembling an obituary column. But, heck, people I know who are conneted to econ keep dying, although this one was not as well known as others. […]
This topic is blowing up in the news. Politicians claiming recipients are laying out cash for drugs and other unneeded things. Funny thing, they didn’t give a damn when 20 million hydrocodone and oxycodone tabs showed up at five pharmacies in 4 small towns having a total population of ~22000 in 2016. Gotta keep those […]
I am mainly linking to this fairly important article by Dan Diamond in The Washington Post. Diamond quotes many people arguing that the US really should do more to get everyone in the world who is willing to take the vaccine vaccinated. I am going to move on quickly to how this could be done, […]
There is an interesting discussion about a topic where I know especially little: K-12 education. Within it, there is a narrow discussion about whether it makes sense to try to teach statistics to people who don’t know calculus. This is a clear question. However, it seems that the people who discuss it skip a much […]
Last night, Professor Heather Cox Richardson discusses the undermining of a citizen’s civil rights by SCOTUS in support of a state law which allows state citizens to infringe upon the rights of other citizens, female citizens within the state even though the actions of the later cause no harm to the former. It is appearing […]
“tlon Uqbar orbus tertius” is an excellent story by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, he imagines a world in which all that exists are minds and ideas. He refers to the assertion that we live in such a world made by the Reverand George Berkeley. In Borges’s wonderful Obis Tertius, objects can be multiplied if […]
Surely someone, not something, must be to blame, must be responsible for whatever catastrophe that may have just occurred. Even CNN knows this. Blaming an event on someone obviates the need to fully explain, to seek a cause; relieves us of the responsibility to understand, to acknowledge the true cause. Seems it is somehow better […]
Blogger and Commenter Professor Joel Essenberg addresses Covid variants being called mutations. As a geneticist, I am troubled by the promiscuous use of the word “mutation” to describe amino acid or nucleotide differences from a reference sequence. In nearly all cases, there is no known functional significance attached to these differences. Accordingly, the differences are […]
An Intro and some history: Alan Collinge at Student Loan Justice Organization. Alan has collected 1,065,931 signatures on his petition asking President Joe Biden to cancel student loan debt. His new goal is to reach 1.5 million signatures. If you believe in the cause you should sign his petition. Petition · President Biden: Cancel Federal […]