So you’ve heard what The View, and Bill Maher have had to say about Ron Paul running for president. But what about The President of Hip Hop? I love the thick vein of skepticism that radical African American activists possess for politicians. We need more people second guessing the state.
To be honest I could have sworn that I had blogged about this already, but I did a search and couldn’t find anything.
I want to write an empirical paper that compares the quality of firemen in Manhattan before and after 9-11. My theory is that the abilities or quality of the average fireman after 9-11 declined compared to before. “Well that’s because we lost some of our best and brightest,” you might say. My theory is that the decline is due to the increased non-monetary rewards of approbation after the attacks. In other words, firemen receive both a financial salary plus whatever sort of honors and prestige come with the position. After 9-11, my guess is that the approbation rewards for firemen shot through the roof but the monetary wages remained relatively the same. In this new pay out structure there is less control over the particular incentives that induce quality. Even bad firemen (I need some proxy variable for quality: results on tests, response time, etc) get high approbation rewards. When the slacker fireman or the guy who just isn’t pulling his weight lately shows up at a cocktail party and people find out he’s a fireman they still ooh and ahhh at his bravery right along side the top performers.
Maybe there are even some implications about the cultural identity of firemen. My guess is that most fireman’s opportunity costs of becoming a fireman is some other line of blue collar labor. Where as given higher approbation pay scales, people with higher opportunity costs join the field. Maybe before 9-11 most firemen joined the team to make a living and provide for their families, whereas after the attacks the applicant pools were filled with thrill seekers and spectators.
My new paper, The Internet and the Structure of Discourse: The Websites of Economists at Harvard and George Mason co-authored with Dan Klein is now published online at Econ Journal Watch. Here is the abstract:
We investigate the websites of economists at Harvard University and George Mason University. We draw a contrast between the two departments by using Robert Nelson’s distinction between the “scholastic” and the “pietistic” approaches to knowledge and discourse. Scholasticism is hierarchical in structure and tends to produce work that is inaccessible to lay readers. Pietism is “flat” in structure and strives to communicate directly with lay readers. The Internet enables economic discourse in the “pietistic” vein, notably direct communication with the “laity” and other forms of public discourse. From the economists’ material found online, we count and compare publications of various types and the online availability of listed works. The data help to characterize Harvard as relatively scholastic and GMU as relatively pietistic. Our intention is not to criticize Harvard for being too scholastic, nor to celebrate George Mason (our home institution) for being pietistic. Our motivations are simply to advance some ideas about how the Internet might affect economic discourse and to suggest that the extent and forms of web utilization serve as a kind of metric on the scholastic-pietistic continuum.
At first, I thought Stumble was just a neat toolbar that you could add onto firefox and click from time to time when you wanted the internet to entertain you. But it’s so much more. It has all of the best parts of every web 2.0 site I’ve seen but better.
Two problems:
1. You probably don’t know very many people on it. Especially if you’re not on it. So get on it and stay on it.
2. Because the sample of people on it are first adopters you get a bizarre internet version of information. For example, I was the first person to “discover” several websites whose reputations in reality far outpaces what their observed reputation on the web is.
Case in point, in the world of stumble I was the first to discover these important sites:
The AEA: The worlds most prominent economics organization.
The Mercatus Center: The top economic educator on capital hill.
The Mont Pelerin Society: Economic network begun by FA Hayek and consisting of several if not all of the living Nobel Prize winners in economics.
Randy Barnett: Has arguably advanced the arguments for anarchism in academic mainstream more than anyone alive.
Andrei Shleiffer: The best non-Austrian economist.
Arnold Kling at Econlog, quoted and linked to Bernard Harcourt at Volokh Conspiracy. Prisons and mental health institutions seem to be substitutes for one another. Today and always in this country anyways.
My comment:
David Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum, is probably the most exhaustive history of incarceration institutions in America. He explicitly parallels the birth and growth of asylums with prisons in the US.
By the way, the functions of both institutions appear to have been achieved effectively by private means long before state, regional, or national provision.
I’m trying to wrap up my first semester of teaching intermediate macro. After surveying all of the major schools of thought I’m concluding with discussions about spontaneous order and some Austrian business cycle theory.
One of my students has brought up, what I have come to realize is a brilliant question:
What if the knowledge benefits of a new technology produced during the boom outweigh the physical capital losses of the bust?
If they do then new money is less disruptive to the economy when it is spent on R & D development. But the question could be a moot point if empirically R & D is not responsive to changes in interest rates. I would assume that this data is easily available, but if anyone knows specifically where I could track it down or knows of anyone writing on similar topics I’d appreciate a note.
PS–Hat tip to Adam Martin for the helpful discussion.
I have a theory about music something akin to Hillary Clinton’s view of child education (I promise never to make a positive reference to Hillary Clinton again): it takes a village. In other words for every super group like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, there’s several dozens of other bands back in the UK who form an entire cultural community that built the genre.
If you enjoyed these oldies but goodies, you’ll love these two new gems (hat tip to Adam Martin for recording them in last years special topics of Public Choice class).
“I’m sure most of you don’t read the newspaper. If you did, you would know that Ecuador just elected a new president. He has a PhD from the University of Illinois, and the main plank of his campaign was a high protective tariff, which shows what they teach at the University of Illinois.”
“There don’t seem to be any effects of global warming except making it harder to kill seals, and since I’m pro-seal I don’t really care.”
This post may not be appreciated or agreed with by many people, but it’s something that has come to mind that I feel compelled to write down nonetheless. In breaking news there has been a terrible school shooting at Virginia Tech. I’d like to start by saying that this is a terrible tragedy and my heart goes out to the victims, their families and everyone effected.
I’m unsatisfied with the argument that pharmaceutical companies need patents on their new drugs because otherwise their R and D is so expensive and long term that a removal of their patent privilege would greatly reduce the number of new drugs that hit the market. The argument then implies that keeping this amount of drugs from dropping is well worth whatever innovations and losses the monopoly restrictions bring along.