The Unbroken Window

Picked this up on Reddit today (I have no idea if it’s true of course), but … we’re doomed: This just happened about 20 minutes ago in downtown Boston. I was at the corner of a major intersection waiting to cross when an adorable kid in his Sox garb pulled away from his texting mother [...]

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THAT, my good friends, is what living in the “good society” is all about. This pertains as much in business, family, church and government as anywhere else. The problem in economics is that it is waaaayyyy toooooo eaassssyyyyy to try to model this out with a couple of reaction functions and a contract curve. Sure, [...]

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Via Alex Tabarrok: Wow, no one saw this coming.  The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 million.  The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered [...]

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Courtesy of my good friend John B.: Who Gets the Blame for the GSA Scandal? Jonathan Horn · 5 hours ago In The Washington Post, columnist Dana Milbank looks at the culture that inspired officials at the General Services Administration to spend taxpayer dollars on extravagant conferences. Milbank asks: Who is to blame? The answer is [...]

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I’ve very much enjoyed during the last month or two the blogosphere’s discussions about Peter Singer’s philosophy. Here is a transcript of an interview that economist Tyler Cowen conducted with him recently regarding his latest book. Singer’s point, extremely simplified, is that we can and should be giving a lot more aid to the world’s [...]

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Isn’t the current distribution of climatic impacts across the planet already “horribly” unequal? After all monsoons do not impact me here in Western, NY nor is drought something that I think I’ll have to reasonably worry about in Rochester. Someone in Turkey is at far more risk for earthquakes than me; someone in New Zealand [...]

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One reason I now distinguish between “E”nvironmentalism and “e”nvironmentalism is that there has been a sea change in attitudes in the environmental community over the past three decades. When I was a Boy Scout and when I first started joining hiking clubs some 20 years ago much of the literature I read was closely dedicated [...]

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It turns out that there has been a confession in the Heartland Incident: In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me [...]

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First the Obama Administration kills the Keystone pipeline. No need to comment on it here – if environmentalists think that preventing this pipeline from being built has any impact on carbon emissions or pollution, or somehow “saves” the midwestern water reservoirs they are badly mistaken. Now, I just learned that the Obama Justice Department is [...]

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OK, so maybe I am exaggerating a little. In the preface to Pricing the Future, author George Szpiro does what many of us only gnash our teeth about. Here is the excerpt: At this point in the preface, it is customary to have thank those who helped in the preparation of the book. Here I [...]

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