It’s 1 Am and I’m too lazy to add links, maybe later
Tyler Cowen, Discover Your Inner Economist.
Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion. Explain how large deposits of a valuable resource (diamonds, oil) can hurt the economies of a poor country.
Dean Smith, The Carolina Way – Read to get better at coaching.
Apparently a degree does not bestow logical thought to the people pursuing it, as this article from today’s Daily Pennsylvanian shows. This writing is unacceptable, not only because it’s biased but because the main argument has no basis.
The number of swimming pools people own is also positively correlated with longer life, more community service, more political involvement, and less smoking. We should all build more swimming pools, and wait for the benefits to come in.
Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. My economic success may depend on it, as some towns that passed anti-illegal immigration laws are now realizing. These towns banned illegal immigrants, yet are having second thoughts, because their economies are now suffering. This article isn’t really rigorous but the point of view fits within my worldview, so I’m sharing.
Abdi Farah, Penn sophomore and basketball player, is an exceptional artist. Check out his work here.
[youtube="http://youtube.com/watch?v=h-f3q6C-8OE"]
I have these four books in my room, maybe I’ll have time to read them, maybe I won’t:
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This book is about how bad we are at predicting unpredictability. Malcolm Gladwell has more.
The Persistence of Poverty, by Charles Karelis. More at MarginalRevolution.
Blue Blood, by Edward Conlon, because of this blog post at Freakonomics.
And finally, The Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, because this Larry Craig business is funny. This book is actually fascinating, if a bit off-putting.
“The differences in spending on clothing, jewelry, and cars, for example, can explain half of the differences in wealth between the races (conditional on permanent income) and a significant share of the differences in education and health spending.”
From Marginal Revolution. The purpose of this post is reasonable discussion, not “See I told you so.” I don’t know why blacks and Hispanics spend a larger proportion of their expenditures on clothes and cars than whites.
Here is the text of President Bush’s speech last night. I am convinced that politics is 95% persuasion and image, and 5% about doing your job well, or being qualified. Note how Bush emphasizes how the battle is between the USA and Iraq on one side, and al-Qaeda on the other.
Google just announced a $20 million prize to the first organization that can send a robotic lander to the moon, go for a walk, and beam back photos. I feel the benefit to humankind from such a robotic visit must be larger than $20 million. Prizes are a far more efficient way of getting results than paying one group in advance. It would be great if there was a website where you could donate money to the purse for different prizes, for the first person to cure cystic fibrosis, or the first person to prove an important theorem, or get to the moon. The bigger the prize, the bigger the incentive people have to try and win it – $30 million for a moon robot would get a faster result than $20 million, or maybe NASA offers a $50 million prize for the first person to set up an observation station on the moon, and gets that station built for them, probably better and cheaper than they could too. Prizes in the billions aren’t unreasonable either – a cure for cancer could be worth $50 billion.
Ichirosan says funny things to dumb reporters.