The Unbroken Window

I am a Lord Jeff of course: Yet Burgard is not alone in his concerns. Last month, when Amherst College turned down an invitation to join edX, it was by a faculty vote of more than sixty per cent. A lot of teachers, some of whom had been browsing Harvard moocs, worried that they threatened to [...]

Read Full Post »

I was reading a short piece this morning wherein the author was making an observation that it is really hard to get a government official to tell him what their estimates for the whooping crane population. There are less than 300 of them in California as I understand it. The government used to do an [...]

Read Full Post »

We run this each year here at the Unbroken Window. I am really sure that this lesson is taught carefully and thoughfully throughout the academy. And I guess it’s some sort of capitalist conspiracy to print this story- we must have made it all up. I was asked the other day by a student if [...]

Read Full Post »

I am sure many bytes are being “spilled” to analyze and comment on Krugman’s latest outburst or peacocking or whatever you wish to call it. Read the comments. Remember that all of those folks think you should get into the community hot-tub with them. A few points: Remember what I said about Woody Going Straight [...]

Read Full Post »

It’s Goldi-Locks economic methodology by the left. Sometimes methodological individualism is evil (like when folks like myself assert that there is no “we”) but sometimes it is essential. Here is a summary of the controversy over the President’s Budget which is suggesting we index social security benefits to a chained CPI rather than the traditional [...]

Read Full Post »

When I first began studying the economics and ecology of wind about 4 years ago, I very much thought the fears of wind-alarmists were, pardon the pun, very much overblown. I don’t mean that wind is the solution to our energy problems (it cannot be, it’s simply not energy dense enough) but rather that fears [...]

Read Full Post »

Only BHO has the ability to make something old appear new again: President Barack Obama is pushing Congress to authorize more federally funded research into clean energy technologies that can wean automobiles off oil. Obama proposed the idea of an energy security trust last month in his State of the Union address, but he was [...]

Read Full Post »

Chicken littles are claiming that millions of jobs are going to be lost because of psuedo-budget “cuts” that may well start today. Check out this ridiculous claim. That’s par for the course for our elected officials, so what if they are off by orders of magnitude on the facts of issues they are supposedly “experts” [...]

Read Full Post »

I will not here chime in on the myriad arguments for and against the minimum wage that redound to economic research or theories. Instead I ask a simple question. Or two. Dear central planners in DC, do you believe that you have unlimited political capital and unlimited time and means to fix the problems in [...]

Read Full Post »

Here is a treat from Tim Harford’s book, Adapt: The first major worker strike in Soviet history took place in 1989 when 250,000 coal miners walked away from their jobs. Part of the protest was about grotesquely dangerous conditions: the death rate for Soviet miners was 15 to 20 TIMES higher than it was for their [...]

Read Full Post »