The Unbroken Window

Half of the $60 million that Governor Cuomo has pledged to support tourism to New York is coming from the Federal government’s Hurricane Sandy relief fund. These funds, not ironically, were never earmarked for relief, but actually just for this purpose. Another pet peeve – in a YNN interview with a director of the State’s [...]

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Let’s take a look at pages 2-15 and 2-16 in the most recent edition of the, “Transportation Energy Data Book.”   Let me ask, do you expect cars to be more or less fuel and energy efficient in the future? Take a look at what has happened to the fuel efficiency of buses and trains [...]

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I just perused this report for a short section in class I have next week (see table 5). This is a table showing workplace injury rates (full disclosure: if you examine the table for mortality you get dramatically different results, a point we may address shortly). The annual workplace injury rate for people working in oil and [...]

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        The table below illustrates one reason why I remain astounded at how the “popular” view of economists has come to be what it is. I sense that the popular view paints us all as market-fundamentalist, anti-tax, anti-regulation, uber-rational, etc. supporters. If political identity actually tells us what we think it does, [...]

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You know, there are actually folks out here in the world that want to understand what the heck we actually know and don’t know. And it’s not particularly helpful when the alarmosphere and denial-osphere can’t have a reasonable discussion. Not only have we talked here about the lack of consensus on what, exactly, is the [...]

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I believe I was reading a book review the other day of a book by philosopher Thomas Nagel. The book basically argues that science is going to have a difficult time, at some point, proving everything. He also seems to be making the argument in the book that we seem to be evolving toward some higher-order species, [...]

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There are estimates that each year during the NCAA Basketball Tournament millions of hours of worker time is “wasted” by watching the games during work, checking scores, running gambling pools and other distractions. However research by the same firm has concluded that in some years, the “losses” are almost miniscule (a few hundred million dollars) [...]

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A canard of the uninformed left is that capitalism leads to monopoly – which of course requires either the elimination of capitalism or the heavily regulation of it by … a … monopoly with guns. And never mind the actual history of anti-trust, which originates in the “Progressive” movement and is now manifest in the [...]

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I was surprised to learn, upon browsing through a recent edition of the Digest of Education Statistics, that parental involvement in their children’s educations has been steadily increasing for a decade. And it has been true across all ethnic and income classes as well. To cite one example, in 1999, 36.8% of all children had [...]

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From Tim Taylor: “Between 2000 and 2010, there was a 67 percent increase in home-based work for employees of private companies. Although still underrepresented among homebased workers, the largest increase in home-based work during this decade was among government workers, increasing 133 percent among state government workers and 88 percent among federal government workers.” I have this [...]

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