Quotes of the day

To repeat what others have said requires education; to challenge it requires brains--Mary Pettibone Poole

If it is the thought that counts, a first step towards a happier Christmas is to spend less, and think more.--Tim Harford

I would point out that in an affluent society, there is a lot of consumption that is deferrable. If everyone scans the headlines and sees "Great Depression," that could very well cause a drop in consumption. And if everyone scans the headlines and sees "recovery," they might spend more.--Arnold Kling

We find that Protestantism increases contributions to the public good, and there is suggestive evidence that it increases reciprocity in the gift-exchange game—that is, the rate at which worker effort increases in response to higher wage offers by the manager. Catholicism decreases contributions to public goods, increases gift-exchange reciprocity, and decreases risk aversion. Judaism increases gift exchange reciprocity.--Daniel Benjamin, James Choi, and Geoffrey Fisher

More than two-thirds of illegal immigrants pay Social Security and income taxes.--Jeff Jacoby

The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.--Paul Graham

If there is one thing that the case of the hacked climate change e-mails proves, it is that scientists are human. And humans do stupid things. Because no matter what the context or motivation, some e-mails should never be written.--Andrew Leonard

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.--Andrew Revkin of the New York Times

You know, unless doing so would hurt national security, or something.--Glenn Reynolds

If those climatologists at CRU were in a position to actually cause the earth to get warmer, don't you think they would have done so? --Tom Smith

It takes about 200 years to get to a world where this is considered smart rather than shameful.--Russ Roberts

I’m just about ready to hit the road. [Kenneth] Feinberg stabbed me in the back.--Robert Benmosche, CEO of AIG

By all accounts, President Obama's visit to China last week was pretty much a failure on all the major issues, which include China's contributions to climate change, nuclear weapons, and various aspects of the world economy.--Gary Becker

“Freshwater” and “saltwater” macroeconomists came to a “brackish” compromise known as the New Neoclassical Synthesis. The New Keynesians adopted the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework pioneered by the New Classicals while the latter accepted the market “frictions” and capital market “imperfections” long insisted upon by the former. This New Synthesis, like the Old Synthesis of fifty years ago, postulates that the economy behaves like a stable general equilibrium system whose equilibrating properties are somewhat hampered by frictions. Economists of this persuasion are now struggling to explain that what has just happened is actually logically possible. But the recent crisis will not fit.--Axel Leijonhufvud

Sarah Palin's book launch drew more media attention than mine. She was irrepressible, notwithstanding David Brooks calling her a "joke." Of course, Brooks praised Timothy Geithner. It is pretty easy to predict which side of the Insider/Outsider debate Brooks will take. The Insiders were on the defensive this week. Is it a blip, or the start of a trend?--Arnold Kling

... it would seem that girls are equally prepared, if not more prepared (more AP math classes), than boys for the SAT math test, and yet boys outperform girls measured both by the difference in mean scores (35 point difference in favor of boys) and the over-representation of boys for scores on the high end (2.22 to 1 ratio for perfect scores), and these differences persist over time.--Mark Perry