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Category Archive for 'Behavior'

Just had the pleasure of watching Rocky with my daughter and that line above was one I missed when I first watched it 30 years ago. At the end of the epic fight, where Rocky had just gone the distance against Apollo (and lost), the news folks and TV folks are swarming Rocky, and upon […]

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A new NBER Paper finds: In this paper, we demonstrate that university students who cheat on a simple task in a laboratory setting are more likely to state a preference for entering public service.  Importantly, we also show that cheating on this task is predictive of corrupt behavior by real government workers, implying that this measure captures a meaningful propensity […]

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This news item caught my eye: The free market of ideas serves those exceptional few with the most intellectual and social capital…only by subjecting everyone else to even higher levels of social control and intellectual scrutiny, all the while asserting these same people’s ‘liberty’ and ‘equal right to speak.’ So not only are markets tools […]

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Deceitful

This is a portion of my most recent water bill: You know how much attention is paid to the practices of credit card companies and mortgage companies and the like? It would be nice if similar scrutiny were universally applied. We get at least three bills that are just like this one. When you look […]

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Just how badly are public pensions underfunded? Here’s a great way to extract an answer: A good response occurred to me, to those cited by Josh who want to argue that underfunding is a mere $1 trillion. OK, let’s issue the extra $1 trillion of Federal debt. Put it in with the pension assets. Now, […]

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What’s Wrong With the World

Y’all may say these sorts of things are little things. I respectfully disagree.

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For those of you needing entertainment, I refer you to the latest edition of the wet sponge. We’re all just sharing opinions, that’s exactly the purpose of a university, right? Not the quest for knowledge? Not seeking truth? Not trying to live better? I refuse to go point by point, see the title of the […]

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I think they are saying that we should ban abortion, and we should end the Endangered Species Act, CAFE standards and recycling. Here is three cheers for the nanny state: “What this ignores is that successful paternalistic laws are done on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis: if it’s too painful, it’s not a good […]

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Apparently we need to ban or limit Coca-Cola and Pringles and Oreos and all those things that are terrible for us not just because we don’t know what’s good for us, but because Coke and Nabisco and Food, Inc. advertise. Never mind the fact that the very essence of politics and governing is advertising, we […]

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Stupid is as stupid does? Or what about what we say? In the most recent survey reported by the AP, it turns out that people really favor increasing spending on all kinds of things by the government. Of course, no one bothers to ask whose money is being spent and they certainly aren’t being asked, “given your […]

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