Wednesday, January 18, 2012
What I’ve been thinking about lately is just how little is knowable about macroeconomics in the real world. Does austerity help? Or is it ruinous? Hundreds of people who’ve made this their life’s work say yes. Hundreds of their colleagues, similarly experienced, say no. Questions on the macroeconomic level are absurdly complex because there are [...]
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Thursday, December 15, 2011
Brody sent a link to an interesting discussion with an economist who talked about income inequality, its implications, its causes, and who gave some references to what look like some cool stuff. Excerpt: This [The Race Between Education and Technology] is a really wonderful book. It gives a masterful outline of the standard economic model, [...]
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Thursday, February 25, 2010
This has always seemed utterly obvious to me — as it would, I expect, to anybody who’s ever lived in a city where the public transportation options didn’t suck — but it’s nice when people who actually know stuff say it: There are three main mechanisms through which high-speed rail can help expand the economy, [...]
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Much as there is an eternal battle between good and evil being waged in the former-DDB’s soul, a similar battle between the pro- and anti-regulation sorts has been waged in argumentation for years. The pro- side are generally reasonable people, who at the increasingly radical fringes become militant treehuggers, meat-is-gender-politics people, and crusaders for Political [...]
…the persistence of these educational achievement gaps imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. A quote of a quote. See it here. The point, less subtly: a hell of a lot of people don’t get that when liberals are whining about educating the poor and giving health care to [...]
You guys may remember that I respect Tyler Cowen enough to have bought one of his books just to get a personalized answer to a question (about how reading speed affects assimilation) and that he is my answer to the thought experiment: If you could sit next to anybody on an airplane, who would you [...]
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As someone who’s ranted many a time about the non-transportation issues involved in public transportation and urban development, I found this blurb pretty interesting: But even subtle growth can have a dramatic impact. The environmental activist group Friends of the Earth estimates that just 10 miles of a new four-lane highway create the equivalent lifetime [...]
I like good charts, so here’s one that displays the creeping socialism in the USA: Be very afraid! Frickin commies! (Got this from Conor Clarke‘s blog post for The Atlantic.)
Great Gladwell article up over at The New Yorker about David vs. Goliath. Gladwell articles follow a particular pattern that goes like this: Example A: (The pressing basketball team as David) Thesis: (David can’t fight Goliath by his own rules) Example B: (Lawrence of Arabia as David) Thesis elaboration Example A cont: (History of basketball [...]
This is one of those posts to get back into the swing of things. The more time passes the more overwhelmed I find the prospect of catching up on all the cat-blog stuff. But then I remember Wes’s Law, which says, more or less, that doing _something_ results, eventually, in accomplishing everything. Or something like [...]