Breaking Promises Could this sort of story have anything to do with the NAACP’s antipathy toward the Bush administration? I guess in a way it seems only fitting that our government has no qualms in reneging on a promise made to a segment of our society that it has always treated poorly in the past. […]
The Stock Market and Economy
Tax Cuts, Round Four The Bush administration is pushing hard on its friends in Congress to get some tax cuts passed for the fourth summer in a row. This time most the things that they are looking for are extensions of some of the tax cuts passed in 2001 that are set to expire in […]
CEO Compensation: A Demand = Supply Model Calpundit challenged the presumption that the 7X increase in (nominal) CEO compensation since 1980 can be explained by a demand = supply model. AB thesis suggests that the increase is explained by factors that deviate from the traditional model. My comments will be limited to the traditional […]
Gay Marriage Ban, Revisited I think Mark Schmitt has, not surprisingly, the right take on how badly the vote on the gay marriage ban went for conservatives: There is no doubt that on gay marriage, the administration at least would rather have the issue than have the ban. That’s because they don’t actually give a […]
The Downside of Low Interest Rates In today’s commentary Stephen Roach takes on the subject of low real interest rates. His argument is that by keeping real interest rates so low for so long (short term real rates have actually been negative for a couple of years now) in order to stimulate the economy, the […]
Read Me Kash wrote a great post on Saturday, which tends to be a slower traffic day. Then I came along and wrote a bunch of long posts, pushing his down the page. So if you haven’t already read it, make sure to check out Kash’s Anti-Terrorism History Repeating Itself? post. In other news, Sometime […]
CalPundit’s Challenge CalPundit looks at wage growth for workers and CEOs and issues this challenge: Odd, then, that CEO pay rose 27% in 2003, isn’t it? Did the supply of CEOs shrink last year? Did demand skyrocket? What’s more, compared to average workers, who remain stuck in the invisible grip of Adam Smith, CEO pay […]
Economics and Replicability The key element of any true empirical result is replicability. If a result is not reproducible, then the purported effect was almost surely the result of either random chance, error, or fraud. This is not limited to the social sciences, of course. Two fairly famous incidents from the natural sciences highlight the […]
Clear Channel Entertainment Compares Bush to Hitler You may recall the castigation MoveOn.org recieved after two entries to its Bush in Thirty Seconds ad contest compared Bush to Hitler. For the record, the entries were simply uploaded to MoveOn’s site without any screening; when MoveOn was alerted to the entries in question, they were […]
Typos Are Fine Apparently, the human eye and brain don’t really care what order the letters of a word are in: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit […]