Quotes of the day

I have never once met a person whose blog I like and then been disappointed. Never.--Tyler Cowen

Interestingly, in terms of both maximizing current contributions and inducing participation, we find that a one-standard deviation increase in female solicitor physical attractiveness is similar to that of the lottery incentive.--Landry, Lange, List, Price and Rupp

Consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college.--JOSEPH MARR CRONIN and HOWARD E. HORTON

But isn't your whole complaint about the market that it counts the welfare of the truly poor for virtually nothing? Now it sounds like you care less about their welfare than the market does. Maybe less than zero. ... So how much weight in the social welfare function does social democracy really give to the truly poor? ... There may be good arguments out there for social democracy. But 'It's better for the poor than laissez-faire,' isn't one of them.'"--Bryan Caplan

I won’t defend Mr. Paulson for not being clairvoyant of the Wall Street collapse. He missed it. Ben Bernanke missed it. Most people missed it. But the measure of a man isn’t whether he can stop a crisis from happening but how he deals with it when it has happened. Do you blame Captain Chesley Sullenberger for hitting a flock of birds, or do you praise how he bravely landed Flight 1549 in the Hudson River?--Evan Newmark

A fresh-faced 31-year-old, Deese dropped out of Yale Law School last year to work for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. When Clinton sank, Deese skipped over to the winning ship, impressed everybody who counts, and landed a desk in the White House. The big guns like Larry Summers and Christina Romer are busy cooking up hilariously sunny budget projections while trying to look like they're keeping the economy from collapsing. So Deese, armed with an undergrad degree in political science, finds the GM portfolio and the fate of millions in his hands. ... It shouldn't come as news, but the rhetoric of American politics is gushing with hypocrisy. Just as Republican "libertarian" arguments for decentralized government often aim to protect the tyranny of local prejudice, Democratic "egalitarian" arguments about inequalities in wealth and income too often aim at concentrating political power in the hands of people like Brian Deese. In an America of free and equal people, no one would need to assure us that the president's men won't be issuing commands about the colors of cars.--Will Wilkinson

[Ronald Reagan] wouldn't have won election if it weren't for inflation, if it weren't for gas lines, if it weren't for the reigning hostage crisis, if it weren't for Afghanistan, if it weren't for the entire litany of Carter administration failures. And when you are as far as Republicans were in the late 1970s, and as far down as they are today, you need the other side to fumble, and for its vision to be discredited. And at the moment, Barack Obama has the ball, and he is going to have the ball until he commits some sort of turnover.--Rich Lowry

A veteran of three wars—my father-in-law joined the communists at fifteen in the anti-Japanese struggle—he has taken the whole thing in stride, remains optimistic, and is gradually regaining his abilities. In my view, he is one of the few true communists left in China: meaning that his outlook is genuinely other-regarding. Relatives and friends visit him at the hospital and they want to know how he’s doing, but he seems more concerned about how they are doing.--Daniel Bell