The Unbroken Window

The fully-loaded gross aggregate cost to all of the students that I will be teaching this academic year is around $25 million.

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In a continuation of the previous post, here are the remaining 27 topics:

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The students in my introductory economics courses will be completing a variety of writing assignments throughout their course, including semester long research projects on topics that are in the news, that are easily illustrated with data, and that can profitably be examined through the application of basic microeconomic principles.

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So that you can drink 1 calorie of diet soda requires 2,200 calories of fossil energy,” he said. “A glass of water is significantly less.”
Read the story here. And yes, I did go to that school. I’ll just pose this one question. The nutritional content of the machine I am using to write this post […]

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Per capita consumption of selected food items, 1980 versus 2005.

Item
Beef (lbs)
Chicken (lbs)
Whole Milk (gal)
Reduced Fat Milk (gal)
Cheddar Cheese (lbs)
Mozzarella Cheese (lbs)
Swiss Cheese (lbs)
Ice Cream (lbs)
Flour (lbs)
Corn (lbs)
Coffee beans (lbs)
Peanuts (lbs)
1980
72.1
32.7
16.5
3.1
6.8
3.0
1.3
17.5
116.9
12.9
10.3
5.1
2005
62.4
60.4
6.6
5.6
10.1
10.2
1.2
15.4
134.1
31.4
9.5
6.6

Read the entire table. Quite frankly, I was surprised by most of it. Sadly, I can’t help but think, “the pizza and fried chicken lobbies must be […]

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I recently read David Cay Johnston’s book, “Free Lunch” which is a critical look at how the wealthiest Americans seek and receive advantages from the government to the detriment of the taxpayers. The overall point is on target and I am sympathetic to many of the stories, despite the usual littering of economic nonsense in […]

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Here is the start of a presentation …

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William Wordsworth penned the following sonnet in 1807 to contrast the increasingly materialistic world with the Natural world that individuals seem to have been losing their awe of.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts […]

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It should be recognized that the American environment, on the whole, is much cleaner than most places around the world. Certainly the environmental destruction revealed by the unveiling of the iron curtain dispelled any notions that love and central planning are better for the environment than commercial society.
However, I don’t want to argue the point […]

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August marks the eleven year anniversary of the latest alteration to the welfare system. The major change enacted was the substitution of federally managed entitlement cash grants (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) with a federally-funded state-run program of cash grants conditional on work requirements and participation limits (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).

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