Quotes of the day

The world is not organised along rational lines.--Matthew Engel

Regardless of your thesis about what a victory or defeat for Greek leftists would do in the financial markets, having better information about the electoral outcome is sure to be valuable. Someone might just make “the best trade ever” in the next two weeks—all thanks to Greece’s restriction on freedom of the press.--John Carney

It is easy to sympathize with the hostility to the many banks that behaved (in retrospect) so foolishly in ways that damaged everyone else as they took on excessive risk in their quests for greater profits. One can understand also the general reaction against capitalism and “market failures” since commercial and investment banks were in the past a leading example of capitalism at work. Yet anyone concerned about the welfare of the poor and middle classes should resist the temptation to attack competitive private enterprise and capitalism- monopoly or crony capitalism should be deplored. This is only partly because “government failure” also contributed in an important way to the financial crisis as regulators did not rein in the asset explosion of banks and households. Indeed, regulators often encouraged lending to lower income families to buy houses with low down payments, large mortgages and ballooning interest payments.  The main reason to be concerned about the attacks on competitive capitalism is that it has delivered during the past 150 years so much to all strata’s of society, including the poor.--Gary Becker

Every technology has its own logic. Facebook “wants” us to log in a lot and to interact with each other – hence the ability to “like” posts, to comment, to “like” comments, and the constant stream of notifications about all of this. This is sinister, but less insidious because it is so brazen. Facebook the technology has metaphorical wants that reflect the entirely non-metaphorical strategy of Facebook the company.--Tim Harford

Quote of the day

Yeah, [I like Obama:] I’m living in London and I’m socialist. What do you expect?--Elle MacPherson, former supermodel, and current policy expert

Every large public school system has many excellent and good teachers. Unfortunately, every public school system also has really bad teachers who cannot be fired. Some miss many classes, others do not know the materials they teach, while others do not really try to teach, and prefer to joke around or mainly give their opinions. They should be fired, but they cannot in part because of the tenure system. Having the power to get rid of the bad teachers would improve everyone’s teaching, partly by raising the incentives and morale of other teachers.
...
Teachers’ unions are the major force opposed to abandoning the tenure system, as they are the major opposition to pretty much every major school reform that has ever been suggested- including charter schools, school vouchers, and evaluations of teacher performance. They are an important hindrance to improving the quality of teaching and the performance of students.
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I oppose teachers unions and the tenure system for teachers (including university teachers) partly because they are especially detrimental to the education received by students from low income and more disadvantaged backgrounds.--Gary Becker, some dude that is much less famous than supermodels

Quotes of the day

[Charles] Dickens knew what a nasty place, both literally and figuratively, the chimney was. He easily passed many a chimney sweep on the London streets, possibly as young as four years old – weary, sooted boys earning a dangerous, miserable, and likely short living, and reaping the contempt of London’s more civilized citizens. The wealthy of Victorian London looked upon the chimney sweeps and saw villains in the making. They depended on those blackened boys for household cleanliness and warmth and, above all, safety, but wouldn’t trust them farther than they could throw their stockings. ... There is no Santa Claus herein. There are only the chimneys themselves, bright symbols of the cheery, loving home and dark images the deepest filth the city – or the human soul – can scratch up. It might be said that Dickens’s fiction – holiday and otherwise – plumbs the blackened, sooty depths of human depravity to ultimately offer hope in visions bright as a blazing hearth. A different type of Christmas spirit, indeed.--Rebecca Martin

And I heard, “Merry Christmas! You still have a job!”--unattributed



... do 46 percent of Golden State voters really identify with drum circles, pot smoking, public urination, indecent exposure, violent brawling, and semi-literate rants against capitalism? And did I mention lice?--Joe Hicks

A Manhattan hedge-fund manager has stepped in to pay for the funeral for Delores Gillespie, the 73-year-old woman who was set on fire in the elevator of her Underhill Avenue apartment building,  ... He called the office of Councilwoman Letitia James, who had set up a fund to collect donations on Monday, and offered to pick up the entire bill. He has since been in touch with the family, said a spokeswoman for James' office.  Relatives and friends remember Gillespie as a warm-hearted, community-minded  woman who helped the down-and-out find jobs and laid out a feast for the homeless every Thanksgiving.--Amy Sara Clark

I thought about making an "every team HAS to have one white guy" rule just because it's fun to think of someone heading into the last round of the draft thinking, "Crap, I don't have a white guy yet — is Steve Blake still available?" But then that opens the door to the whole "Does someone like Gortat or Gasol count as a white guy or a foreigner?" debate which has never been solved. It's like the Roe v. Wade of basketball arguments.--Bill Simmons

[Greg Engert] left a Georgetown graduate literature program to dive into the beer world full-time, and he approaches it partly as a humanities professor might, if such professors were young, unpretentious, boundlessly energetic, fast-talking, and decked out in quietly stylish clothes. Get him going and out come elaborate, colorful tales about the evolution and history of a particular beer. It’s beer as narrative, and he’s an entertaining, passionate storyteller. Engert also displays a scientist’s pride as he shows off the elaborate system of climate control and piping, custom-built to guarantee every drop is served through clean lines at the temperature appropriate for each style.--Mark Garrison

Quotes of the day

Public-sector unions and other interest groups wrap their causes in the rhetoric of equality. Often, what they’re really protecting are privileges that raise the cost of public services to everyone else — including citizens who earn a lot less than civil servants. Yes, Wall Street’s bonuses are stratospheric. But the New York Times recently reported that Medicaid was paying nine executives $500,000 or more per year to operate nonprofit homes for the mentally disabled. Okun’s message is that equality is a public good, whose benefits — social cohesion, political stability and the like — are worth paying for. The trick is not to overpay.--Charles Lane

I spent hours upon hours toiling away at a register, scanning, bagging, and dealing with questionable clientele. These were all expected parts of the job, and I was okay with it. What I didn’t expect to be part of my job at Wal-Mart was to witness massive amounts of welfare fraud and abuse.

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I understand that sometimes, people are destitute. They need help, and they accept help from the state in order to feed their families. This is fine. It happens. I’m not against temporary aid helping those who truly need it. What I saw at Wal-Mart, however, was not temporary aid. I witnessed generations of families all relying on the state to buy food and other items. I literally witnessed small children asking their mothers if they could borrow their EBT cards. I once had a man show me his welfare card for an ID to buy alcohol. The man was from Massachusetts. Governor Michael Dukakis’ signature was on his welfare card. Dukakis’ last gubernatorial term ended in January of 1991. I was born in June of 1991. The man had been on welfare my entire life. That’s not how welfare was intended, but sadly, it is what it has become.

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Other things witnessed while working as a cashier included people ignoring me on their iPhones while the state paid for their food. (For those of you keeping score at home, an iPhone is at least $200, and requires a data package of at least $25 a month. If a person can spend $25+ a month so they can watch YouTube 24/7, I don’t see why they can’t spend that money on food.)--Christine Rousselle

At 25 I made the naïve mistake of getting an MFA in Creative Writing at a private college in New York City.

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I hadn’t done any research on schools with funding or really given it much thought at all. I thought when I graduated I’d just sell my novel and pay my student loans with the book advance. Needless to say that didn’t happen and when I graduated in 2005, I had $37,000 to pay back. Not only that but the MFA program was super unsupportive—both the faculty and students. Despite doing well in the program and really trying to connect with people I finished feeling no better off than when I’d started. A few years later when applying to residencies and then PHD programs I couldn’t even get letters of recommendation from most of my former teachers.

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I felt like the school had taken advantage of my naiveté by charging all this money for essentially a useless degree.

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I started to realize the least common denominator in all of my problems was me and my thinking. I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself for all the things life wasn’t giving me and start being grateful for what I had. As for my job I was clearly in this dog walking profession for a reason and maybe instead of thinking it was beneath me, I’d just try to do the best at it I could. I finally grew up and accepted life on life’s terms and decided to go out there and do the best I could with what I had. This is when things really started to change for me.

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When I’d have fear about money I’d pay more on my loans, or give an employee a raise, or contribute a little to a charity. I call this daring God to financially take care of me—faith in action. I wanted proof that I’d be taken care of. Initially, I’d do it and sort of cover my eyes afterwards waiting for the ceiling to fall in. It never did. Inevitably, I’d get a new client or business would pick up with training or pet sitting.--Susie DeFord

Occupy, are you listening to this?--Cav

Christopher Hitchens and I were friends for 40 years, plus another five when we were enemies. He took ideas so seriously that if he disagreed with you on a matter that he deemed important, he’d literally throw you in a ditch. It was 1972, the height of our mutual virility. He and I went to a pub to celebrate his most recent intellectual victory over the establishment press. I intimated that sometimes women could be funny on purpose. Even back then, the thought enraged him. Hitchens threw a drink in my face, pressed a lit cigarette into my neck, and hit me over the head with a barstool. The next thing I knew, it was two days later and I was lying hogtied and naked beside the M5. Hitch had already severely damaged my reputation in a vicious essay in the Guardian. But that’s how he operated, and that’s why we loved him.--Neal Pollack

Washington state’s creation of the ferry monopoly is what governments have increasingly done since courts misconstrued the Constitution in a way that licenses governments to dispense particular economic favors by restricting general economic liberty. It is now routine for government to have transactions with rent-seekers — private interests who want public power used to confer advantages on them, or disadvantages on competitors.--George Will

Even though the average congressperson might have more information than the average taxpayer...the cumulative information held by 150 million taxpayers far exceeds the cumulative information held by 538 congresspeople. When it comes to the efficient allocation of public goods...we need to consider sums...not averages. It's interesting to consider though just how many average taxpayers it would take to equal the amount of information held by the average congressperson.--Xerographica

In a market -- one of your beloved markets -- an entrepreneur who presents the same product over and over, deriding customers for not buying it, would be the real fool. You'd laugh at such a fellow and tell him he deserves what he gets -- bankruptcy. Yet, you never view your political program that way, do you?--David Brin

Behind Door #1 are people of extraordinary ability: scientists, artists, educators, business people and athletes. Behind Door #2 stand a random assortment of people. Which door should the United States open? In 2010, the United States more often chose Door #2, setting aside about 40,000 visas for people of extraordinary ability and 55,000 for people randomly chosen by lottery. It's just one small example of our bizarre U.S. policy toward high-skill immigrants.--Alex Tabarrok

We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect. But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

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That is what economic freedom looks like. Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. People understand this. Freedom of speech, for example, means that we put up with a lot of verbal and visual garbage in order to make sure that individuals have the right to say what needs to be said, even when it is inconvenient or unpopular. We forgive the sacrifices of free speech because we value its blessings. But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.--Jeb Bush

Evaluate ideas by their consequences (consequentialism)
Be aware that your ideas may be wrong and may fail (fallibilism)
Don’t be hypercritical (anti-skepticism)
Try out, debate, and evaluate alternatives (experimentalism).--Elmar Wolfstetter

Quotes of the day

What I want to do now is to prevent another me. Last thing I want to happen is for someone to replace me as a cautionary tale.--Ryan Leaf, former NFL QB

Success is the result of randomness, effort, and ability.--Eric Falkenstein

Poverty isn't about money; it's a state of mind. That state of mind is low conscientiousness.--Bryan Caplan

Two powerful forces are threatening to drive America from a meritocratic equilibrium to a nonmeritocratic one. Recall that to survive in a democratic country, a meritocracy must enjoy a welcoming culture and offer large, widespread benefits to citizens. In the United States, both of these factors are being challenged: the first by a spreading belief that markets are a bad method of rewarding the meritorious; the second by a reduction of the benefits that most people derive from those markets.--Luigi Zingales

Bud Selig: Tear down this intentional walk.--Joe Posnanski

When he took office, Barack Obama promised "an unprecedented level of openness in Government." As a major part of that commitment, he pledged fidelity to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which he called "the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government." It is hard to reconcile these lofty memos with the Justice Department's proposed rule instructing federal agencies to falsely deny the existence of records sought under FOIA. But at least the Obama administration is open about its desire to mislead us.--Jacob Sullum

The President’s argument is, in effect, “We can’t wait for democracy.” The Constitution gives the power of the purse to the Congress, not the President. If the Congress doesn’t want to enact his proposals, then it shouldn’t, and that’s how the system is supposed to work. I am not surprised that the President is using the legislative flexibility he has to maximum effect. I am a bit surprised that he sees a political benefit in framing himself as an Imperial leader who can and should ignore democratic processes. This seems inconsistent with Democratic party rhetoric in recent years. Democracy is so inconvenient when your party controls the Presidency and the opposition can block your legislative agenda.--Keith Hennessey

It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't have gotten them without that. But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it's one target, it's easy to blame them and congress certainly isn't going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for.--Mayor Bloomberg

The Olympus scandal exposes the all-too-cozy nature of Japanese business that was subject to so much praise in the 1980s. Japanese corporations are dominated by insiders, and companies are often run for the benefit of these insiders rather than shareholder interests. Because of the keiretsu and cross-holdings, shareholder pressure and oversight have traditionally been minimal. Hostile takeovers are almost nonexistent, as is shareholder activism. Though there has been increased government scrutiny of business practices, Japanese regulators have been slow to force changes. ... the fact that United States authorities rather than Japanese regulators appear to be taking the lead in investigating the Olympus transactions speaks volumes. ... Right now, the discourse is about Chinese domination. The Chinese economy is what economists term command and control. The state directs industry and has profited greatly by doing so. In the United States, meanwhile, there is an outcry over a relatively small loan guarantee to Solyndra, the solar company. China has clearly benefited from its cheap labor and huge investment. But it also has cronyism, state protectionism and hidden debts at the local level. This sounds like Japan in the 1980s.--STEVEN M. DAVIDOFF

Occupy Wall Street has raised more than $500,000 in New York alone to support anti-greed demonstrations and, seven weeks into the movement, protesters are finding that having money creates headaches. The challenges have included how to become a non-profit entity, how to deal with credit card companies withholding donations, choosing a bank that shares the movement's philosophy and budgeting what to spend cash on. The totals raised -- more than $500,000 in New York and around $20,000 in Chicago, Richmond and other cities -- have surprised everyone from the protesters to those overseeing their finances.--Ben Berkowitz and Chris Francescani

... the NBA is a monopoly and operates in a manner (it monopolizes!) that would be illegal outside the sports world. Unlike in Silicon Valley, there are no NBA “start-ups.” You cannot create a new NBA team without permission of the incumbent owners. The league also has to approve changes in teams’ location and ownership. What does this mean? The owners can get together and agree to jointly cut expenses, that is, the player salaries. Players have limited opportunities to play professional basketball in other countries, but realistically, if you are a world-class professional basketball player, you probably want to be in the NBA. ... As human beings, we are programmed to reject one-sided deals, even when surrender might be the rational choice.--Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier

The person who wants to get you fired is not your friend.--David Henderson

If multiple people can't reproduce what's supposed to be a scientific result, then there may well be something wrong with it. And if someone that you're working for or with won't show you raw data, then head for the door, because nothing but trouble can ensue. The alarm bells have at that point gone off, whether you can hear them or not.--Derek Lowe

Even when science shows time and again that it’s not so, we continue to persist in believing that sugar causes our kids to be hyperactive. That’s likely because there’s an association. Times when kids get a lot of sugar are often times when they are predisposed to be a little excited. Halloween. Birthday parties. Holidays. We may even be causing the problem ourselves. Some parents are so restrictive about sugar and candy that when their kids finally get it they’re quite excited. Even hyper. This does not mean that there aren’t a ton of great reasons why our kid should not ingest large quantities of sugar. As almost any parent knows, sugar has been linked to cavities and the obesity epidemic. Just don’t blame it for your child’s bad behavior.--Aaron Carroll

It’s not just that Jobs’ refusal of treatment is “crazy,” as former Intel chief Andy Grove put it to Isaacson. This tragedy sprung from the very thing that made him so great: his unwillingness to believe that technology needed to be clumsy, ugly, or difficult. In consumer products, this led to the MacIntosh and the iPhone. In animation, it created the Pixar canon. But biology and medicine are messy, and demanding a magic solution doesn’t always produce one. ... I’m haunted by a story I heard once about a biotech industry lobbyist who went to see a congressman and was told, “You guys don’t do innovation. The iPad. That’s innovative.” As a society, it seems to me, we say that a lot. We value the magic box built out of many more basic innovations much more than what came before – and as a result, we overlook the work that is actually foundational. And I worry that were this less true, medicine could have done even more for Steve Jobs.--Matthew Herper

But if the apparently timeless appeal of Disney World is symptomatic of the spiritual malaise of contemporary culture, it is also an important indicator of its spiritual hunger. Disillusioned by the lies of our culture, millions choose to escape to a kinder and more magical facsimile of hope at Disney. As C.S. Lewis once observed, the potency of fantasylands are their ability to break the "evil enchantment of worldliness" and arouse a dim longing in us for something unreachable within the drab flatness of wonton perception. Millions visit Disney World for a chance to walk through the looking glass, to be transported to another, more whimsical world where our imaginations take flight. While the happiness it offers is ephemeral, the profound feeling of disenchantment that draws visitors to momentarily withdraw is not.--Chris Cuthill

Surprisingly to me, but maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, [film documentarian Ken] Burns is quite confident that he would not have been successful without government funds. I think this could be an example of a phenomenon that Milton Friedman often noted: that people who are used to something have trouble imagining the world without that thing, in this case, government funding of Burns's documentaries.--David Henderson

I never saw this side of Ken when we were in our kids' classroom.--Cav

Quotes of the day

I noticed one person missing in all the media mentions of NFL ceremonies running up to and during 9/11. Maybe it's because his death, and the ensuing coverup, were so shameful and messy. But he gave up his career -- and his life -- because of 9/11 and because of his sense of honor and duty and idealism. And while everyone was waving flags yesterday and all that, I was hearing him screaming his last words on that ridge in Afghanistan: 'I'm Pat ----ing Tillman!--Fred Fried

Why do the microwave and frozen dinner inexorably lead to obesity? According to the economists, the cheapness of calories (both in terms of price and time) has led us to dramatically boost consumption. Food stops being something we make and create — it doesn’t require very many lever presses, so to speak — and becomes something we simply ingest. Eating just gets easier. And then we get fatter. But maybe we’re not just consuming more calories because they’re available at such a low cost. Maybe we’re also consuming more calories because each calorie gives us less pleasure. The lesson ... after all, is that when we don’t work for our food — when it only requires a single press, or a few whirls of the microwave — it tastes much less delicious.--Jonah Lehrer

As for you punctuation nuts - relax. It's a blog not a dissertation.--buddy_girl

On September 12 President Obama sent his American Jobs Act to Congress. He called on Congress to pass a bill with additional spending of $447 billion, with an extension of payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits, more infrastructure spending, and additional aid for state and local governments. Temporary tax reductions have limited effect in stimulating investment and economic growth. Since consumers and businesses know that the tax cuts are temporary, they do not make permanent changes in their behavior. This finding won Professor Milton Friedman the Nobel Prize in economics. In order to inspire confidence and change behavior, tax cuts have to be permanent. Similar solutions to unemployment were tried in 2009, as part of the $825 billion “stimulus.” The “stimulus” failed to spur GDP growth significantly and create jobs, despite record low interest rates and monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve. If an $825 billion stimulus—plus cash for clunkers, auto bailouts, and mortgage forgiveness programs—resulted in an annualized GDP growth rate of only one percent two years after the end of the recovery, and succeeded only in raising the January 2009 unemployment rate of 7.6 percent, why would a package that is half the size reduce an unemployment rate that is now 9.1 percent?--Diana Furchtgott-Roth

The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s factory, newly obtained e-mails show.  The Silicon Valley company, a centerpiece in President Obama’s initiative to develop clean energy technologies, had been tentatively approved for the loan by the Energy Department but was awaiting a final financial review by the Office of Management and Budget. The August 2009 e-mails, released exclusively to The Washington Post, show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal. In response, OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators.  Solyndra collapsed two weeks ago, leaving taxpayers liable for the $535 million loan.--Joe Stephens and Carol D. Leonnig

The White House also noted to ABC News that the Bush administration was the first to consider Solyndra's application and that some executives at the company have a history of donating to Republicans. The results of the Congressional probe shared Tuesday with ABC News show that less than two weeks before President Bush left office, on January 9, 2009, the Energy Department's credit committee made a unanimous decision not to offer a loan commitment to Solyndra. Even after Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, analysts in the Energy Department and in the Office of Management and Budget were repeatedly questioning the wisdom of the loan. In one exchange, an Energy official wrote of "a major outstanding issue" -- namely, that Solyndra's numbers showed it would run out of cash in September 2011.--MATTHEW MOSK, BRIAN ROSS, and RONNIE GREENE

Legislators get more power when they define crimes more broadly because they reduce the role of judges in deciding who is guilty; and prosecutors have more power because they have more discretion about what and how to prosecute. As a result, legislators and prosecutors tacitly cooperate with each other, leading to both more law and less: more on the books, and less on the street, in the sense that the laws are so broad the police and prosecutors get to decide whom to go after and find guilty. Those decisions are about power. In the “rule of too much law,” [William] Stuntz advises, “too much law amounts to no law at all.” His solution to this set of problems is to replace the vicious cycle that creates them with a virtuous cycle based on cultivating a relationship between those who break the law (or are tempted to) and those who enforce it. For most of the twentieth century in the Northeast and Midwest, the ratio of police officers to prison inmates was two to one. Today, it is less than one to two. “More than any other statistic,” Stuntz writes, “that one captures what is most wrong with American criminal justice.” More cops mean more deterrence. More deterrence means fewer arrests and fewer convictions. In the 1990s, New York City had the biggest drop in urban crime during the decade. It also had the biggest increase in its police force. ... His hunger for more justice and mercy and, as a result, less crime and punishment made his work great. In this brave book, as contrarian as it is utopian, he constructs a powerful explanation about the vast and costly failure of the American criminal justice system and why the quest to reform it must be a high priority. He left an inspiring model of how.--Lincoln Caplan

Photo link here.

Quotes of the day

Originalism--the theory that we should Interpret the Constitution according to the public meaning of its words at the time of its ratification--serves important instrumental goals. It promises to give relatively clear and objective definitions to crucial but contestable terms, such as “cruel and unusual” or “due process of law,” by recurring to the linguistic usage of those who ratified the Constitution. That interpretive process, though hardly easy, at least protects us from the sort of judicial casuistry that threatens to drain all fixed meaning from the Constitution’s words. ... Originalism has another instrumental virtue: It tends to generate such substantively attractive results as limited government, the rule of law, and respect for individual rights. For that, we can credit not just the sound political judgments of the Founders but also, and more generally, the supermajoritarian constraints imposed on Constitutional ratification. Because the ratification process has to satisfy so many parties, who have many conflicting interests, the Constitution and its amendments tend to support universal values. Contemporary judges, because they do not face those similar constraints, risk following the twists and turns of case law toward unlimited government, arbitrary laws, and disregard for individual rights. Originalism, by recurring to the Constitutional meanings that won ratification, offers a way (though not the only or necessarily best way) to stave off that ugly outcome.--Tom Bell

I understand why Dr. Roubini, who is an academic, would want to re-read Marx. I can see where Mr. Magnus would feel that, in order to make his real argument to the state and the people, he could get better traction by saying something a little scary. I’m not surprised, really, that the same medium that circulates videos of cats playing the piano also re-circulates and resuscitates long-dead and discredited ideas like Marxism. Bringing Marx back from the grave is not helpful, though. Marx was wrong because his model society, of human behavior, was wrong. Haven’t we had enough of the wrong models already?--Infinite Guest

Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools closed. You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches—and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.--Ai Weiwei

Newly obtained emails show that the White House was better informed about a failed gun-tracking operation on the border with Mexico than was previously known. Three White House national security officials were given some details about the operation, dubbed Fast and Furious. The operation allowed firearms to be illegally purchased, with the goal of tracking them to Mexican drug cartels. But the effort went out of control after agents lost track of many of the weapons. The supervisor of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation in Phoenix specifically mentioned Fast and Furious in at least one email to a White House national security official, and two other White House colleagues were briefed on reports from the supervisor, according to White House emails and a senior administration official. But the senior administration official said the emails, obtained Thursday by The Times, did not prove that anyone in the White House was aware of the covert "investigative tactics" of the operation.--Richard Serrano

The Fremont, Calif. firm, [Solyndra], which promised two years ago that it could help create new clean-tech jobs, announced Wednesday it was closing its doors and laying off workers. Taxpayers might now be responsible for repaying Solyndra’s loan, part of an estimated $80 billion in subsidies the Obama administration had committed to clean technology projects and innovation in this country since 2009. In 2009, Solyndra received the Energy Department’s first loan under the new administration’s program to spur clean technology innovation. Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu had visited Solyndra’s plant, and Vice President Biden spoke at its groundbreaking via live video. Each touted the company as a model of the administration’s effort to grow a “green” industry and create millions of new American jobs.--Carol Leonnig and Joe Stephens

[President Obama]’s having his own teachable moment between campaigning and experienced governing. First, he blamed the Bush administration, then he blamed Congress, and now he’s saying [to voters], ‘It’s your fault for expecting too much of me.’ The last thing voters want to hear are excuses or whining. You can’t offer excuses and then be an inspirational leader.--Ron Bonjean

A 9.1 percent unemployment rate is a serious handicap for an incumbent. But it’s not too late for President Obama to change course and make America a friendlier environment for job creation by changing regulations. His cabinet secretaries control regulations that are now discouraging growth. A few examples. President Obama could ask EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to hold off on new environmental regulations until unemployment goes down. He could ask the NLRB acting general counsel to drop the charges against Boeing for opening a new plant in South Carolina. He could ask Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to speed up on drilling permits. He could ask Labor Department Secretary Hilda Solis to go slow on new dust regulations that will result in closure of coal mines, and new regulations on federal contractors for hiring veterans that will cause endless paperwork. There’s Dodd-Frank regulations too. The list goes on, it’s just up to the president….--Diana Furchtgott-Roth

All said and done, I’d give that [$100 million contract, $41 million guaranteed] back [to the Washington Redskins] and I’d come here [to the New England Patriots].--Albert Haynesworth

Photo link here.

Quotes of the day

I will never figure out two things about Bernard's career: Why the NBA left him off "50 at 50," and why he didn't win a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar in 1979.--Bill Simmons

If you were Rondo, wouldn't that have been the picture-perfect time to point to one of Obama's advisors and say, "Hey, why don't one of you teach this guy how to run the country?--Sam, Cambridge

I am digging this Sam.--Cav (backstory here).

Economic disparities remain, but in 1960 nine in 10 blacks were poor, whereas today three of four blacks are not. Tracing the remaining disparities to racism becomes trickier by the year. The 'institutional racism' many trace these statistics to is something black people of King's time would have considered a much more workable adversary than open bigotry and segregation. Some holdouts remain bigots, but not enough to keep Barack Obama out of the White House, and overall, racism is considered as socially embarrassing as pedophilia. King could never have predicted that this would happen so quickly. Is America 'post-racial'? Afraid not. But is the treatment of black people in America still so transparently and grievously unjust as to make a mockery of our democratic ideals and require redress with all deliberate speed? Afraid not, again, and Dr. King would rejoice, as we should with him.--John McWhorter

The theory of the firm in neoclassical theory focuses on how much the firm should produce and optimal capacity. Game theory looks at strategic issues arising under various payoffs. Neither approach captures the nature of innovation, the trial and error risk-taking of the visionary entrepreneur or the power of creative destruction to enrich our lives. These ideas are at the heart of the Austrian approach to the firm, an approach that has made even less headway in mainstream academic circles than Austrian business cycle theory.--Russ Roberts

How do the Angels continue to defy the odds? This is a problem we haven't totally solved yet. But I do have two theories. One possibility is that team defense has a cascading effect that raw numbers can't quite detect. A great defense does more than help a pitcher's batting average on balls in play and his ability to prevent runs. It shortens innings. That lets a starting pitcher go deeper into games with less stress on his arm. More innings for starters takes pressure off a bullpen. A fresher pen then enables a manager to use his best arms in high-leverage situations, instead of relying on lesser relievers to put out fires because his more talented teammates are spent. Less stress on pitchers' arms can also decrease the risk of injury, thus preventing a team from having to call up Triple-A piñatas or spend valuable dollars on replacements. A second possibility is Mike Scioscia. When a team fares better than expected every year for eight seasons, it might be that the manager is executing strategies that give his team an edge that others lack. Studies have been murky in isolating the effects that managers have on their team. We can look at tactical moves, which can reveal managers who know when to use one-run strategies (such as bunting or stealing bases) and when to play for the big inning. But the best managers might make a bigger impact in other areas, such as motivating his players to succeed, or simply putting the best nine guys on the field at any given time.--Jonah Keri

Union affiliates in some states are heavily involved in spending members' money on social causes that are sometimes contrary to members' own political leanings. For example, California unions donated more than $2 million—including $1 million from the California Teachers Association—to a campaign in 2008 to defeat Proposition 8, the successful state initiative that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. A CNN exit poll found that 56% of voters in union households supported the initiative despite the opposition of the union leadership. "The California Teachers Association does not poll its members on how it spends its political money," Larry Sand, a union critic and 28-year veteran of the state's school system, observes. Instead, union leaders vigorously oppose efforts to allow their members more control over how their dues are spent. In California, for example, labor groups and their allies expended an astounding $54 million in 2005 to defeat Proposition 75, which would have required that unions seek the permission of members to spend dues money on political contributions. Among the biggest nonunion contributors to the campaign to defeat Prop 75 was the Democratic Party, which kicked in $3.275 million. In Washington state, meanwhile, a judge ruled in 2000 that the Washington Education Association violated a state law barring the use of union dues for political purposes without employees' permission. The union fought the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court before losing in 2007 and agreeing to pay nearly $1 million in fines and rebates to teachers. The NEA's leadership has not been enthusiastic about President Obama because his education secretary, Arne Duncan, touts policies like merit pay for teachers and the expansion of charter schools, which the union opposes. Grumble as they do, the NEA's leadership has nowhere else to go. Sadly, neither do the 40% or so of union workers who may not vote for the president but will see a large portion of their dues spent on his re-election.--Steven Malanga

Dr. Kim couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog’s bark. Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plain in the face; dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.--Barbara Demick

Perplexities of Consciousness is composed mostly of detailed case studies of aspects of the stream of experience about which people seem to err, grossly and persistently, even in circumstances that might seem favorable to reflection. We aren’t just fallible in hard cases, I argue; we err systematically and pervasively about even the most basic facts of the stream of experience, and even when we set our minds to it carefully and conscientiously.--Eric Schwitzgebel

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Quotes of the day

Hedge-fund managers made a big bet on Barack Obama and other Democrats in 2008. Now, with the 2012 contest gearing up, some prominent fund managers have turned their backs on the party and are actively supporting Republicans.  Daniel Loeb, founder of Third Point LLC, was one of the biggest Obama fund-raisers in 2008, rounding up $200,000 for him, according to campaign-finance records. In the decade prior, Mr. Loeb and his wife donated $250,000 to Democrats and less than $10,000 to Republicans.  But since Mr. Obama's inauguration, Mr. Loeb has given $468,000 to Republican candidates and the GOP, and just $8,000 to Democrats. Hedge-fund kings have feelings, too, and the president appears to have hurt them.--BRODY MULLINS, SUSAN PULLIAM and STEVE EDER

Indeed, if there is one disturbing characteristic of President Obama's foreign policy to date it is, quite simply, that the President is far too easily diverted from his stated goals and foreign policy convictions because of political opposition. On multiple issues, from Afghanistan and Gitmo to Libya and the Middle East peace process, Obama has laid out a policy, either publicly or privately, and then steadily backed away from it in the face of opposition, either from foreign governments, domestic political constituencies or his own military. He has far too often pursued the policies of least political resistance.--Michael Cohen

The Administration's budget did propose spending levels which make the recently increased rate of government spending as a share of GDP permanent, regardless of the reason for the recent increase. If you want to see this in a way that takes account of changes in nominal GDP growth related to the recession, then you can compare actual spending before the effects of the recession began with proposed spending after the effects of the recession are over. For all of 2007, spending was 19.6 percent of GDP. For all of 2021—after the impacts of the recession and the final year of the budget window—the budget submitted in February proposed spending equal to 24.2 percent of GDP. These two budget facts are part of the data presented in my Wall Street Journal chart and are taken directly from CBO tables. The 4.6 percentage point increase represents $1 trillion more federal spending per year at 2021 levels of GDP.--John Taylor

Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting. Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years--Malcolm Harris

We often see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and wonder why they don't invest in what would really make their lives better. But the poor may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives. They often behave as if they think that any change that is significant enough to be worth sacrificing for will simply take too long. This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible and celebrating when occasion demands it. We asked Oucha Mbarbk [a rural Moroccan who had only found 100 days of work in the past year] what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better-tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, "Oh, but television is more important than food!"--ABHIJIT BANERJEE, ESTHER DUFLO

Lighting a candle really is better than cursing the darkness.--Bryan Caplan

What this world needs is some sort of universal standard so we'd always know for sure who is good and who is bad. The Ten Commandments was a start. That list covers some of the basics. But it's a bit dated, and it doesn't cover the important questions of our day, such as who is arrogant, who doesn't work hard enough, who should come out of the closet, who is a hypocrite, who is an Internet troll, and so on. Society is inventing new ways of being bad more quickly than we can evolve the rules to cover the new situations. We need some sort of standard that can keep up. I'm unqualified for the task of creating this new standard of good and bad because I believe free will is an illusion. By my view, we're born, our molecules bump around then we die. No one is good or bad if we're all just bumping around according to physical laws. Any standard for good and bad behavior that I suggest would be inconsistent with my own point of view. But for some reason I'm going to suggest just such a standard anyway. Apparently I can't help myself.--Scott Adams

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Quotes of the day

One hundred fifty years ago today, Col. Robert E. Lee was offered the command of the United States army. ... But after the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for 75,000 men, Virginia, Lee's home state, seceded. ... To many people today, it would see strange that Lee would turn down such a command and follow the apparently hopeless fate of the Confederacy. Although he was born and raised in Virginia, like Winfield Scott, he had spent much of his life serving the United States of America all over the continent. He disagreed with slavery, and believed that secession was unwise. ... It came down to his view of state sovereignty. Lee viewed himself as a Virginian more than an American. He would follow the choice of his state even though he personally disagreed with it. He viewed his service to the South not as a fight against the Union, but as a defense of Virginia.--Joshua Horn

Higher prices of foods mainly hurt the poor since poor countries and poorer families within a given country spend a much larger fraction of their incomes on foods than do rich countries, and then richer families within a country. For example, the share of national income spent on food is over 40% in India, less than that but still large in China, and under 15% in the United States. If families were spending 40% of their income on food, a 30% increase in food prices would raise by 12% the income they would need to maintain the same level of consumption of all goods. By contrast, a family spending only 15% of its income on food would only need a 4.5% increase in their income to maintain the same consumption basket. This simple arithmetic explains why the current rapid price increase in foods and other commodities, and past large increases in these prices, often caused great distress among poor families of Africa, Asia, and elsewhere in the world. ... during the current sharp run up in food prices, several food-exporting countries, such as Russia and Ukraine, have banned, or greatly restricted, the ability of farmers to export their produce. This lowers the price of food to urban consumers in these countries, and thereby helps the urban poor. However, such bans reduce the prices received by poor farmers of these countries. This reduces their incentives to raise their production of food, and makes these farmers worse off. It also raises the cost of food to families in food-importing countries, and thereby hurts the poor in these countries. Since farmers in developing countries are generally much poorer than those who live in cities and other urban communities, the poor may overall be made worse off when countries greatly restrict their food exports. ... An income subsidy approach has the advantage of allowing prices of foods and other goods to be determined by the forces of supply and demand. As a result, it encourages famers to grow more food when food prices rise, and also encourages poor (and other) consumers to reallocate their spending away from foods that rise most in price, and toward other foods and consumer goods.--Gary Becker

... many grand issues remain unresolved at the frontiers of physics: What is the origin of inertia? Are there extra dimensions? Can a Theory of Everything exist? But even at the undergraduate level, far back from the front lines, deep holes exist; yet the subject is presented as one of completeness while the holes—let us say abysses—are planked over in order to camouflage the danger. It seems to me that such an approach is both intellectually dishonest and fails to stimulate the habits of inquiry and skepticism that science is meant to engender. ... If Newton’s laws are at the bottom of everything, then one should be able to derive the second law of thermodynamics from Newtonian mechanics, but this has never been satisfactorily accomplished and the incompatibility of the irreversible second law with the other fundamental theories remains perhaps the greatest paradox in all physics. It is blatantly dropped into the first days of a freshman course and the textbook authors bat not an eyelash. ... the “God is a mathematician” viewpoint is one of selective perception. The great swindle of introductory physics is that every problem has an exact answer. Not only that, students are expected to find it. Such an approach inculcates our charges with an expectation that is, in fact, exactly contrary to the true state of the world. Vanishingly few problems in physics have exact solutions and a physicist’s career is one of finding approximations and hopefully not being too embarrassed by them. ... The equation that governs the behavior of any quantum system, Schrödinger’s equation, is as deterministic as Newton’s own, but as many people know, quantum mechanics predicts only the probability of an experiment’s outcome. How a deterministic system, in which the result is preordained, abruptly becomes a probabilistic one at the instant of measurement, is the great unresolved mystery of quantum theory, and yet virtually none of the dozens of available quantum textbooks even mention it. ... Physicists have indeed gone further than other scientists in describing the natural world; they should not confuse description with understanding.--Tony Rothman

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.--Albert Einstein

You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We'll have that debate. You're not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we're stupid?--President Obama

Donald Trump has advocated for massive tax increases that display a stunning lack of knowledge of how to create jobs. His love for a socialist-style universal health care system and his alarming obsession with protectionist policies are automatic disqualifiers among free-market conservatives. This publicity stunt will sputter and disappear just as quickly as the ‘The Apprentice’ is losing viewers.--Chris Chocola

If the man who really should be the mayor, the next mayor of the city of New York, the great police commissioner Ray Kelly, chooses not to run, and if my former adversary [Eliot Spitzer] does run as an independent in 2013, I will run for mayor of the City of New York.--Dick Grasso

I want my son to watch "The Natural" someday, hear Roy Hobbs say, "Some mistakes you never stop paying for," and know that it's not just words in a movie. I want my son to know that you haven't lived until you've fought back, that you haven't won until you've lost, that you can't understand what it's like to relish something until you've suffered, too. I want him to understand that it's the 21st century, that we sit around picking our heroes apart all day, that we expect them to be superhuman at all times, that we get pissed off when they aren't, that it's hypocritical if you really think about it.--Bill Simmons

[Edward Wilson's] new argument, in a nutshell, amounts to a frontal attack on long-accepted ideas about one of the great mysteries of evolution: why one creature would ever help another at its own expense. Natural selection means that the fittest pass down their genes to the next generation, and every organism would seem to have an overwhelming incentive to survive and reproduce. Yet, strangely, self-sacrifice exists in the natural world, even though it would seem to put individual organisms at an evolutionary disadvantage: The squirrel that lets out a cry to warn of a nearby predator is necessarily putting itself in danger. How could genes that lead to such behavior persist in a population over time? It’s a question that bedeviled even Charles Darwin, who considered altruism a serious challenge to his theory of evolution.--Leon Neyfakh

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--Thomas Jefferson et al

We don’t think of love as a strength, but as a compromise of strength. And we certainly don’t think of the value of love in affecting mass, social change, and yet Napoleon realizes he and his work will be forgotten and other leaders will flicker and fade while the work of Christ carries on. And why? Because Jesus loved his men, and charged those men to take his message of love to the ends of the earth. I am wondering whether or not we think of the great commission as a duty, a charge, or a joyful expression of love?--Don Miller

Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Louis XIV strove in vain to secure this. They conquered the world, yet they had not a single friend, or at all events, they have none any more. Christ speaks, however, and from that moment all generations belong to him; and they are joined to him much more closely than by any ties of blood and by a much more intimate, sacred and powerful communion. He kindles the flame of love which causes one’s self-love to die, and triumphs over every other love. Why should we not recognize in this miracle of love the eternal Word which created the world? The other founders of religions had not the least conception of this mystic love which forms the essence of Christianity.--Napoleon Bonaparte

For three months, the Arab world has been awash in protests and demonstrations. It's being called an Arab Spring, harking back to the Prague Spring of 1968. But comparison to the short-lived flowering of protests 40 years ago in Czechoslovakia is turning out to be apt in another way. For all the attention the Mideast protests have received, their most notable impact on the region thus far hasn't been an upswell of democracy. It has been a dramatic spike in tensions between two geopolitical titans, Iran and Saudi Arabia. This new Middle East cold war comes complete with its own spy-versus-spy intrigues, disinformation campaigns, shadowy proxy forces, supercharged state rhetoric—and very high stakes.--BILL SPINDLE and MARGARET COKER

Can one person controlling an identity, or a group of identities, really shape social architecture? Actually, yes. The Web Ecology Project’s analysis of 2009’s post-election protests in Iran revealed that only a handful of people accounted for most of the Twitter activity there. The attempt to steer large social groups toward a particular behavior or cause has long been the province of lobbyists, whose “astroturfing” seeks to camouflage their campaigns as genuine grassroots efforts, and company employees who pose on Internet message boards as unbiased consumers to tout their products. But social bots introduce new scale: they run off a server at practically no cost, and can reach thousands of people. The details that people reveal about their lives, in freely searchable tweets and blogs, offer bots a trove of personal information to work with. “The data coming off social networks allows for more-targeted social ‘hacks’ than ever before,” says Tim Hwang, the director emeritus of the Web Ecology Project. And these hacks use “not just your interests, but your behavior.” A week after Hwang’s experiment ended, Anonymous, a notorious hacker group, penetrated the e-mail accounts of the cyber-security firm HBGary Federal and revealed a solicitation of bids by the United States Air Force in June 2010 for “Persona Management Software”—a program that would enable the government to create multiple fake identities that trawl social-networking sites to collect data on real people and then use that data to gain credibility and to circulate propaganda.--Andy Isaacson

My experience with my blank book, What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex, has lessons for all of us. It shows that if you have a clear idea, you deliver it well, and then shout about it loudly (and with the right tools), you can make anything happen – you could even get a blank book to the top of the bestseller charts. One small step for an Ideas Man, one giant leap for publishing.--Shed Simove

Perhaps [Henri] Matisse did suffer from fear and loathing like the rest of us, but there is no trace of them in his work. His studio was a world within the world: a place of equilibrium that, for sixty continuous years, produced images of comfort, refuge, and balanced satisfaction. Nowhere in Matisse's work does one feel a trace of the alienation and conflict which modernism, the mirror of our century, has so often reflected. His paintings are the equivalent to that ideal place, scaled away from the assaults and erosions of history, that Baudelaire imagined in his poem L'Invitation au Voyage.--Robert Hughes

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Quotes of the day

The young woman just told the plain, straight, truth: I want to be her friend but she doesn’t want to be mine. She went on, I’d like her to be my friend. I think I’m a good friend. Talk about the real language of a real heart. Talk about truth telling. I don’t know where my heart learned to translate it’s sentiments into such false sophistication, but after hearing this conversation, I think false sophistication is akin to lying, and I don’t think lying is the right way to get what you want.--Don Miller

It's almost as if the muni salesmen are reading from the script written by the mortgage bond guys in 2005. Remember them? They were the people who insisted that all the "talk" of a housing bubble was irresponsible.--John Carney

Two things I would strongly suggest the [Securities and Exchange] Commission look at is the 500 shareholder rule and the requirements to be a qualified and/or accredited investor to invest in privately held companies. Both of these rules directly or indirectly keep small investors, ie the general public, from investing in privately held companies. Most people do not qualify as accredited or qualified investors so their ability to invest in privately held companies is significantly restricted. And because privately held companies cannot have more than 500 shareholders, most companies prefer institutional investors who can invest large sums of money to small investors who cannot. Some of the most exciting companies to emerge in the past decade have decided to stay private for longer periods of time. There are many reasons why that is the case, but one of the reasons is that founders, Boards, and senior management realize that being public and having your employee equity go up and down every day has a cultural impact that is not always good for the organization.--Fred Wilson

Ryan has moved us off Unreality Island. He is forcing Americans to confront the implications of their choices. With a few straightforward changes, his budget could be transformed into a politically plausible center-right package that would produce a fiscally sustainable welfare state while addressing the country’s structural economic problems. I suspect the process Ryan has started will take us back toward the moderate framework the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission proposed a year ago. Great journeys begin with one bold step.--David Brooks

I don’t want to be alarmist but it is important to be sensitive to cracks in your paradigm. If you wait until it is obvious that you are wrong then it is too late.--Karl Smith

... nobody who writes what Krugman wrote should be mistaken for a person who is being reasonable.--Steve Landsburg

An Oxfam study found that when carpet makers in Bangladesh were pressured to fire their child laborers, the kids went to their next best alternatives: prostitution or starvation.--Bryan Caplan

War: What is it good for? Well, minority rights for one thing. Regardless of what you think of America’s overseas military adventures during the last century, they’ve all had positive domestic outcomes: Minority groups that have contributed to war efforts have been rewarded with expanded rights.--Robert Saldin

A longitudinal analysis suggested that shifting into more committed relationships was followed by improvements in subjective well-being. Little support was found for the assumption that people with a high level of well-being select themselves into more committed relationships.--Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

The slums of Chicago are full of first-round leaders.--Peter Jacobsen

On the train ride home—with the bailout check in your pocket—you think about how the hot tears scalded your cheek when you had to explain to your parents how bad things had gotten. You tell yourself it was all for theatrics: Crocodile tears for their sympathy. But in your most secret heart you know you weren't lying to them: You were only lying to yourself.--Ash Bennnington

Who’s going to get butt-naked right now and stand on a stool and start clapping their hands? I don’t know. Do they have that guy?--Kevin Millar

We’re going to get home right now and my wife’s going to look at me and say [Expletive], you’re 0-6. You guys stink. We all bring this [expletive] home with us, man. We care. We’ll figure it out. We have to. We don’t want to let anyone down. That’s it.--Dustin Pedroia

“I want to feel everything,” Nick [Charles] told me, and I thought I knew what he meant. I thought he meant that he wants to breathe in the mountain air, and really taste the calamari, and take in every reaction from his beautiful little daughter Giovanna. And I know that he did mean all those things and more. But I also think that he means he wants to feel EVERYTHING. He does not want to lie to himself. He wonders if he has spent too much time lying to himself. He does not want to withdraw even for moment. He knows that people are watching, and they can be inspired. He knows that his wife and daughter are with him, and every moment is precious. He knows that he has so few good days left, and as he told me: “I don’t have time for the BS. I just don’t. I’m dying.” And if we are honest with ourselves, truly and devastatingly honest, maybe we should ask: Is it really so different for any of us?--Joe Posnanski

Quotes of the day

Life isn't like a story, it's more like a run-on sentence.--Eric Falkenstein

IN REAL LIFE, MOST OF US ARE A MIX of wise and foolish, prudent and silly, thoughtful and impulsive. Nevertheless it helps us to see what the issues are by setting out the alternatives as a simple choice. That is what Proverbs 9 does for us. It pictures two women, Wisdom and Folly, calling out to people. In some ways, this drive toward a simple choice ... is typical of Wisdom Literature. It is a powerful, evocative way of getting across the fundamental issues in the choices we make. ... There is a sense in which someone who accepts wisdom is already proving wise; the person who rejects wisdom is a mocker or wicked. Hence the powerful contrast of ... “Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you; rebuke a wise man and he will love you.”--Don Carson

We all saw him run that 40. Oh my goodness, that's the slowest 40 I've ever seen in my life.--Rex Ryan, on why Tom Brady dropped to the sixth round of the NFL draft

[Walter Williams'] students learn more about free markets before 9 a.m. than most college kids do all day — or maybe all semester, given the biases of the modern academy.--JOHN J. MILLER

I’m happy to have gotten my education before it became fashionable for white people to like black people.--Walter Williams

When you talk about liberty, you have to smile.--Milton Friedman

I thought one of the strongest arguments for the mandate--and the broad outlines of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act--was people with pre-existing conditions. The new high-risk pools were supposed to be a stop-gap for those people until PPACA kicked in. But so far, just 12,000 have signed up, or about 3% of the expected total. Either pre-existing conditions just aren't the large problem that advocates claimed, or something has gone disastrously wrong with the implementation of these pools. ... thanks to the rules making it illegal to exclude children with pre-existing conditions, insurers have now stopped selling child-only policies in 34 states. Both the government of Massachusetts and the administration are eagerly exploring the option of simply commanding insurance companies to sell policies at the price they would like to pay, a tactic that doesn't really have a great track record in modern industrial economies.--Megan Mcardle

In terms of income, the gap between rich and middle class is growing, but in terms of happiness it is relatively low by broader historical standards. Second, a lot of envy is local. People worry about how they are doing compared to their neighbors, their friends, their relatives, their co-workers, and the people they went to high school with. They don’t compare themselves to Michael Bloomberg, unless of course they are also billionaires. When the guy down the hall gets a bigger raise, perhaps by courting the boss, that’s what really bothers us. In other words, envy and resentment are not going away and they also do not stem fundamentally from the contrast between ordinary lives and the lives of the very wealthy. ... The weight has not swung to the point where there is more unearned wealth than earned wealth and so Americans identify with business and a business ethic, especially compared to attitudes in Europe. Americans know that they have done well by their pro-business and pro-wealth ethic. Should they trade in those views for a bundle of envy and resentment? The case for that switch has not yet been made and fortunately there is still a lot of common sense out there.--Tyler Cowen

Price equals marginal cost. And the marginal cost of accessing a journal article is pretty much zero. The research has been written, the type has been set, and the salaries have already been paid — usually thanks to a university, think tank, or government grant. So the socially optimal price is: free. Every time we charge a price higher than this, we risk pricing out someone who might benefit from the insights of an academic scribbler.--Justin Wolfers

In the days after this quake, intellectuals were divided between the impulse to hold fast with the government at a time of crisis and the urge to point out failures in leadership. I frequently heard comparisons of Japan’s nuclear lobby to the American entanglement with defense contractors.--Evan Osnos

So really, the question isn't how will we feed 9 billion by 2050? The question is how many people will we really have and what will they be eating? Poverty of course plays a big role in both these issues because, as Juergen Voegele, director, agriculture and rural development, the World Bank, pointed out to Revkin: "We already have close to one billion people who go hungry today, not because there is not enough food in the world but because they cannot afford to buy it." Raising incomes, or course, is a difficult nut -- one that doesn't succumb to a solution hatched in a lab. But more income means better-educated families, and even declining population growth. The flip side, though, is that rising incomes are also associated with higher meat consumption, which can get us closer to option five on Smil's lifestyle if we are not careful. So the best case: to raise incomes and to incentivize less resource-intensive food consumption.--Samuel Fromartz

I don't buy individual Chinese stocks.
I don't buy stocks with market caps under $500 million (and usually not under $1 billion).
I don't invest in one-drug biotech companies.
I don't do private placements.
I don't buy closed-end fund IPOs.
I don't trade naked options.--Joshua Brown

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.--Barack Obama, in 2007

When Jackie Robinson broke into baseball, he had to be the best. There was no alternative. Today, black athletes can show up and fail and nobody will say blacks can’t play. We can afford incompetent athletes, but we can’t afford an incompetent president. The first black president needed to be better than Jimmy Carter.--Walter Williams

I ... suggest that the legitimacy of a war is established not by how it is organized, but by whether its aims are both morally and strategically sound. The Iraq War was a mistake, in this sense, not because Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder opposed it, but because it involved serious strategic miscalculations on the part of the American government: An overestimation of the danger that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States, and an underestimation of the difficulty of occupying Iraq and transforming it for the better. ... There is no perfect way to fight a war: Every approach to military action comes with distinctive dangers as well as with advantages. Which is why discretion in warmaking really is the better part of valor. Some conflicts are better approached as multilaterally as possible. Some are better fought under explicit American leadership, or by America alone. But many, in Iraq and now in Libya, are better left unfought entirely.--Ross Douthat

No clear national or even humanitarian interest for military intervention. Intervening well past the point where our intervention can have a decisive effect. And finally, intervening under circumstances in which the reviled autocrat seems to hold the strategic initiative against us. This all strikes me as a very bad footing to go in on. And this doesn't even get us to this being the third concurrent war in a Muslim nation and the second in an Arab one. Or the fact that the controversial baggage from those two wars we carry into this one, taking ownership of it, introducing a layer of 'The West versus lands of Islam' drama to this basically domestic situation and giving Qaddafi himself or perhaps one of his sons the ability to actually start mobilization some public or international opinion against us. I can imagine many of the criticisms of the points I've made. And listening to them I think I'd find myself agreeing in general with a lot of it. But it strikes me as a mess, poorly conceived, ginned up by folks with their own weird agendas, carried out at a point well past the point that it was going to accomplish anything. Just all really bad.--Josh Marshall

Until Apple introduced its highly popular touchscreen device [the iPhone] in 2007, which went on to become the world’s leading smartphone, Deutsche Telekom had been generating decent sales from its American operation, with growth in some years surpassing that achieved in Germany.  But after the iPhone went on sale, sold exclusively at first by AT&T in the United States, T-Mobile USA began to lose its most lucrative customers, those on fixed monthly plans, who defected to its larger American rivals — AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which began selling the iPhone in February.--KEVIN J. O'BRIEN

Photo link here.

Increasing the supply of medicine and vaccines to a preindustrial society will cause living standards to fall

I did not realize that. From Karl Smith's Fourteen Non-Obvious Points From Economics.

Photo link here.

UPDATE:  Jim Manzi contests, writing:

What about Europe from before to after the Industrial Revolution? The supply of medicine and vaccines was increased, and living standards subsequently rose enormously. Same problem again: The rule simply assumes “cause,” and this precludes falsification.

Chart of the day: Marginal expenditures across the globe

Source here, via Abnormal Returns.

Chart of the day: Economic Freedom and Income per Capita

Steve Landsburg also provides this context for the graph:

The measures of economic freedom come from the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World project. Criteria include freedom to own foreign currencies and maintain bank accounts abroad, freedom to start businesses and compete, low taxes, low government spending, and equal treatment under the law. The most recent report ranked Hong Kong as the freest country in the world, with an overall rating of 9.05 out of a possible 10; the United States ranked sixth with a score of 7.96. Egypt, at 6.68, ranks 80th out of 141 countries.

Quotes of the day

The usual touchstone of whether what someone asserts is mere persuasion or at least a subjective conviction, i.e., firm belief, is betting. Often someone pronounces his propositions with such confident and inflexible defiance that he seems to have entirely laid aside all concern for error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes he reveals that he is persuaded enough for one ducat but not for ten. For he would happily bet one, but at ten he suddenly becomes aware of what he had not previously noticed, namely that it is quite possible that he has erred.--Immanuel Kant

Next week, Indian politicians plan to ban all Bollywood movies for “sucking the blood from the poor” because they charge for movie tickets.--Vivek Nemana

... [high school] students with credit cards are less financially literate than students without credit cards.--Journal of Family and Economic Issues, Volume 31, Number 2, 151-160

I favor such [economist ethics] codes, but I'm not sure they will help much. First, most economic research doesn't matter in the first place. Second, the research which does matter very often is distorted anyway. It is pulled out of context, exaggerated, presented by intermediaries and political entrepreneurs without qualification, and so on. That's the real problem. In this context I'm not sure that a conflict of interest statement is going to push people closer toward truth; the process wasn't accurate or finely honed in the first place. What is published is already so much more scientific than the policy process itself. Improving the former inputs with an ethics code seems like pushing on the less important lever and to some extent it is a very weak substitute for the almost complete lack of an ethics code in politics itself. Third, a lot of the problem is economists in government --advising -- rather than what is published in economics journals. Newspapers already have conflict of interest policies for many (or all) of their writers, but I don't see they are much enforced or have much improved the quality of most Op-Ed pages as policy advice.--Tyler Cowen

Brad DeLong is not a nice man. I would say worse, but I aspire to be a more generous soul than Brad.--Don Boudreaux

The new [health innsurance] system is based on a series of expert projections on how people will behave. In the first test case, these projections were absurdly off base. According to the Medicare actuary, 375,000 people should have already signed up for the new high-risk pools for the uninsured, but only 8,000 have. More seriously, cost projections are way off. For example, New Hampshire’s plan has only about 80 members, but the state has already burned through nearly double the $650,000 that the federal government allotted to help run the program. If other projections are off by this much, the results will be disastrous. ... Companies and unions across America are running the numbers and discovering they would be better off if, after 2014, they induced poorer and sicker employees to move to public insurance exchanges, where subsidies are much higher. The number of people in those exchanges could thus skyrocket, especially as startup companies undermine their competitors with uninsured employees and lower costs. --David Brooks

Every inquiry into paleoclimate controversies, no matter how much whitewash was applied, concluded that climate scientists should archive data. If Neukom, Jones and their coauthors publish a multiproxy article, that means the multiproxy data, not just the output. If the contributing authors are not willing to archive their data, then it shouldn’t be used in a study in a climate journal. End of story. Nor is it sufficient for the author to provide the addresses of the various contributors and force an interested reader to obtain data from each of them individually. There’s no guarantee that they will cooperate. The obligation rests with the publishing authors.--Steve McIntyre

If the [autism-by-vaccination claims] allegations are true, [Andrew Wakefield, a doctor, and an attorney] managed to kill more people than Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy put together.--Megan McArdle

[Peyton Manning] was very encouraging. He always has been. He's just that kind of a guy, a very classy guy.--Tom Brady

I don't remember hearing that lyric in "Hit 'Em Up."--Bill Simmons

Being someone that many teams passed over there was a reason for it, you know? They didn't think I was a very good player, and they were probably right. I wasn't doing a good enough job listening to my coaches, I wasn't working at it hard enough, I wasn't good enough. Going 199th, it forces you to be critical of yourself. That ends up being the best thing for you.--Tom Brady