Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in Methodology on Dec 14th, 2009
Climate scientist Al Gore tells us that Artic Ice soon to vanish in summer. So what? Won’t that make shipping goods easier and have us consume less fossil fuels getting goods from East to West? I love this quote at the end: Jensen said the biggest ice sheets – Greenland and West Antarctica – were […]
Posted in Environment on Dec 14th, 2009
Remember that climate activists want us to reduce global CO2 emissions by 80% (from 1990 levels) by 2050. They argue that if we all just used a few squiggly light bulbs and carpooled a few times a week we could get there. I suppose it is possible. However, the CBO just released its study of […]
Posted in Money on Dec 13th, 2009
Here. Yet, the bust in the twenties, which drove up foreclosures, did not induce a collapse of the banking system. The elements absent in the 1920s were federal deposit insurance, the “Too Big To Fail” doctrine, and federal policies to increase mortgages to higher risk homeowners. This comparison suggests that these factors combined to induce […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 12th, 2009
A fun question from a student: Does the law of diminishing marginal utility mean that we should eat dessert before our veggies at dinner? The law of diminishing marginal utility explains ex post why we made decisions. So if you ate your dessert before the veggies it would tell me that you got more pleasure […]
Posted in Government Gone Wild on Dec 11th, 2009
And I wanted to hire Michael Jordan to do some consulting work for me, I would have to pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars for his services, no doubt. But that does not imply that I SHOULD be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars having Michael Jordan advise me on how to trick people […]
Posted in Macroeconomics, Standards of Living on Dec 11th, 2009
Even during a speech at West Point regarding sending more of our men and women off to war in Afghanistan, the President could not help but invoke the “fact” that he inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Well, that may be so. I can pull out data to support this (it was […]
Posted in Politics on Dec 10th, 2009
If the UAW is considered a national treasure, that is. I asked a student to investigate how much of the $787 billion of stimulus bill went toward national park funding? The National Parks have historically had a huge backlog of maintenance projects (roughly $9 billion worth) and many were shovel ready. Given their stature, one […]
Posted in Competition on Dec 10th, 2009
I just received a 30 page packet this morning to prepare for my grading of my courses. The gist of the 30 pages … please use our online grading resources. Every professor got the same packet.
Posted in Macroeconomics on Dec 9th, 2009
So the Administration is happy that TARP is going to be less costly than planned, and expects to not have to spend $200 billion of it (but it will, on beer goggle research – see prior post). But I just learned that “Treasury expects the bailout to cost $200 billion less than expected, and that […]
Posted in Government Gone Wild on Dec 9th, 2009
By doing this: How about $100,000 for a puppet show in Minnesota or a $2 million replica railroad in Nevada. Or how about this: U of A received $450,000 to examine the division of labor within ant colonies, and taxpayers paid the $500,000 tab on an ASU study of the genetic makeup of ants to […]