Quotes of the day

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.--Don Marquis

I only seem smart because for some reason I have always had an easy time understanding the paradoxes of monetary economics. I got Cs in French, computer science, and freshman English. --Scott Sumner

Why were banks so much stronger back then [in the 1930s]? My answer is that they lacked deposit insurance, so they had to instill a sense of trust in the public. They had to behave responsibly.--Scott Sumner

The intellectual advantages of proximity keep industries like advertising, publishing and finance — which offer the highest returns to those with the most information — in dense urban cores.--Edward Glaeser

It is not clear how a government might encourage people to be nicer, but one famous economic study does suggest a way: Ray Fisman and Ted Miguel looked at the behaviour of diplomats in New York. The Scandinavians committed 12 unpaid parking violations between them; diplomats from Chad and Bangladesh notched up over 2,500. But when the city was given more power to punish offenders, all the diplomats cleaned up their act – niceness is best supported by legal incentives.--Tim Harford

Rasmussen polls voters. It asks where people approve or disapprove of the president’s performance. 56% disapprove of President Obama’s performance — including 46% who strongly disapprove. Only 44% approve — only 25% strongly approve. His popularity has melted faster than any elected president going back to at least FDR.--Don Surber

An intercepted e-mail from a professor at the Climate Research Unit in England to a professor at the University of Pennsylvania warned the latter: "Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act" and urged the American professor to delete any e-mails he may have sent a colleague regarding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When a business accused of fraud begins shredding its memos and deleting its e-mails, the media are quick to proclaim these actions as signs of guilt. But, after the global warming advocates began a systematic destruction of evidence, the big television networks went for days without even reporting these facts, much less commenting on them.--Thomas Sowell