Quotes of the day

Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium.--Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics

If your child is habitually rude or even violent, then changing behavior has to be your priority; it's a precondition for any deeper progress. You can't discuss your child's feelings while he's screaming or kicking you. And no matter how mellow your child is, you've got to tailor your explanations to his age.--Bryan Caplan

The key to understanding why market economies have outperformed planned societies is not recognition of the ubiquity of greed, but understanding of the power of disciplined pluralism. The primary strength of the market economies – and certainly the strength of their economic performance – results from the way in which the market provides freedom to experiment and opportunity to imitate successful innovation, yet is ruthless in cutting off successful experiment. Planned societies, in contrast, have been typically slow to innovate and, when they have done, have been quietly slow to acknowledge when innovation has failed – as most innovations do.--John Kay

The Fed isn’t really trying to create inflation.--Scott Sumner

Here in the United States, one thing that strikes me about my most liberal friends is how conservative their thinking is at a personal level. For their own children, and in talking about specific other people, they passionately stress individual responsibility. It is only when discussing public policy that they favor collectivism. The tension between their personal views and their political opinions is fascinating to observe. I would not be surprised to find that my friends' attachment to liberal politics is tenuous, and that some major event could cause a rapid, widespread shift toward a more conservative position.--Arnold Kling

The main danger to liberty here is not the TSA but rather a set of American attitudes which, at the same time, take our current "war" both far too seriously and also not nearly seriously enough. Overall, I'd like to see less posturing in these debates and more Thucydides.--Tyler Cowen

"All of us?" Really, Mr. President?--David Henderson

The companies with multimillion-dollar contracts to supply American airports with body-scanning machines more than doubled their spending on lobbying in the past five years and hired several high-profile former government officials to advance their causes in Washington, government records show.--Fredreka Schouten

Unbeknownst to the 12 of us [jurors], we were playing out a script to the letter. Our inability to reach an accord, while not the stuff of Law & Order, was not a failure per se but actually set in motion a chain of events that allowed all parties to get the something if not good then at least reasonable for all involved from an otherwise terrible situation. All I could think as I walked to my car after being excused was this: from chaos comes order. This system that we look at and think that it’s in disrepair, that nobody can possibly fix it or in which you have “activist judges” on one side and uncaring, throw-the-book-at-them judges on the other side just isn’t a fair characterization. What you truly have is a proverbial sausage factory: it’s incredibly messy, nothing seems to make sense, nothing looks good or reasonable or even real, but at the end of the line there is something like justice. It doesn’t always look right. It doesn’t always feel right. It doesn’t even always taste right. But it’s at least palatable.--Tux Life

Beginning in the 1950s, however, a growing band of East Asian countries followed Japan in mimicking the West's industrial model, beginning with textiles and steel and moving up the value chain from there. The downloading of Western applications was now more selective. Competition and representative government did not figure much in Asian development, which instead focused on science, medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic (less Protestant than Max Weber had thought).--Niall Ferguson

The religion of peace further distinguishes itself.--Tony Woodlief