Around the Web

  1. As Bad As ObamaCare Is, Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act Was Worse
  2. From our own Dr Shikida in the Cato Journal: “Why Some States Fail: The Role of Culture” [pdf]
  3. Stop Blaming Professors: Study finds students themselves, not professors, lead some to become more radical in college
  4. The World Cup and “soccer” in general: Nationalism versus internationalism
  5. The agony of a Left-wing gun lover
  6. History happens all the time

Around the Web

  1. Political scientist Jason Sorens on the elections in Europe (best summary I’ve read; it’s short, sweet, and to the point)
  2. Examining Piketty’s data sources for US wealth inequality (Part 4 of 4)
  3. Greece the Establishment Clause: Clarence Thomas’s Church-State Originalism
  4. Strong Words and Large Letters
  5. The African Muslim Fist-Bump
  6. Why US Intervention in Nigeria is a Bad Idea

Around the Web

  1. A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside of an Enigma
  2. Gary Becker on François Ewold on Michel Foucault on Gary Becker (pdf)
  3. Check Your Obedient Privilege
  4. Political scientist Jason Sorens on the difference between states and governments
  5. Rational expectations don’t require smart people
  6. The State as a Metanarrative (when post-modernism meets libertarianism; h/t Mark Brady)
  7. Twisting Libertarianism (a great debunking of the most recent prominent straw man attack on libertarianism)
  8. A Liberty Society versus a Status Society

Around the Web

  1. Criminal defense attorney Ken White has the most thoughtful take on the recent SCOTUS ruling that pit Clarence Thomas against Antonin Scalia
  2. Ayn Rand versus evolutionary psychology. Economist Bryan Caplan explains why Ayn Rand was wrong
  3. Why were American Economics textbooks so Pro-Soviet? A great question from Caplan (again)
  4. Inequality: Haven’t we had this discussion before? Economist Peter Boettke, a specialist in the history of economic thought, asks the question
  5. Remembering Why Hayek Mattered. A political scientist from Princeton, Keith Wittington, provides a great example

Around the Web

  1. The Globalization of Apartheid from anthropologist Keith Hart. I have a critique (as well as lots of praise) in process.
  2. Kapital for the Twenty-First Century: A review of Thomas Piketty’s new book by James K Galbraith.
  3. The Many Problems with “Equal Pay”: Legal scholar Richard Epstein brings his usually clarity to the table
  4. Taxes Are Much Higher Than You Think: A great op-ed from Nobel Prize winner Edward Prescott and UCLA economist Lee Ohanian in the Wall Street Journal
  5. An open letter to President Obama from a prominent center-Left economist (and Democratic Party member): Give Us Back Our Statistical Data
  6. Scratching the Surface: Some proposals for campaign finance reform from a law professor guest blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy

 

Around the Web

  1. Are Iran and Israel trading places?
  2. Morocco’s mentally ill await deliverance from their demons
  3. Bangkok’s ‘Mexican’ Gangsters (think about the infinite promise of globalization while you browse through this short, mostly photographic, essay)
  4. ¿Qué tiene de malo el muro?
  5. 10 Questions Libertarians Can’t Answer, and Hope You Won’t Ask!

Around the Web

  1. An excellent piece by Matt Steinglass in the Economist on John Kerry’s failure in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
  2. I know Dr Shikida linked to this earlier, but I think it’s worth highlighting again. A university professor at a law school in Brazil was recently assaulted by students for his political views, and Dr Shikida points out that today’s professor-assaulters are tomorrow’s journalist-killers. Disturbing, and in Portuguese.
  3. In response to Dr van de Haar’s explosive and much-welcomed introductory post on the myth of the Commercial Peace, here is a good introductory pdf by MIT’s PR Goldstone on the strengths and weaknesses of the theory.
  4. E Wayne Merry: Why is Moscow now pursuing an economic Eurasian Union? In brief, the Russian derzhava is turning inward on itself, in part for domestic reasons but more broadly because of its inability to compete (on different indices) with the European West, the Chinese East, or the Islamic South.
  5. John Allen Gay: Kirchick: “The Putin regime can tell Ukrainians, ‘you wanna protect Orthodox Christianity, you stay with Moscow.’ And he’s using this all throughout the former Soviet space. So this is a geostrategic issue for him.” Would Western pressure for gay rights in Russia improve their lot, or just turn domestic gays into traitors? I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this one…
  6. How many people does it take to colonize another star system?

Around the Web

  1. Ukraine and BRICS from historian Daniel Larison at The American Conservative
  2. The Sympathy Problem: Is Germany a Country of Russia Apologists? By Ralf Neukirch at Spiegel Online
  3. You Don’t Know the Best Way to Deal with Russia from economist Bryan Caplan over at EconLog
  4. The Right to Self-Determination in International Law and Practice by political scientist Jason Sorens (PhD, Yale) over at the PileusBlog

Around the Web

  1. Letter to the Editor: Gun Control
  2. There is an initiative to split California into six separate states (I’ve written about this before, too, but be sure to scroll through the ‘comments’)
  3. Guest notewriter Hank Moore has his new blogging project up and running
  4. Japanese Americans, Internment, Democracy, and the US Government
  5. Does opposing intervention equal ignoring the plight of protesters in foreign states?
  6. Moral Panics, Sex Panics, and Production of A Lebanese Nation
  7. Monster Surf Exposes Rare Petroglyphs in Hawaii

Around the Web

  1. Missing from President’s Day: The People They Enslaved
  2. The Left Still Harbors a Soft Spot For Communism from Cathy Young at Reason
  3. Tyler Cowen on practical gradualism vs. moral absolutism, for immigration and revolution; see also Dr Delacroix’s very relevant “If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely” article [pdf] in the Independent Review
  4. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, James Freeman reviews the results of Obama’s stimulus package five years on
  5. Theologian and philosopher Eric Hall on Confusing Confucianism with Collectivism

Eye Candy

Below the fold… Continue reading

Around the Web

  1. Permanent War versus Peace; Professor Angelo Codevilla elaborates
  2. Law professor at Fordham deceptively carries on the tradition of censorship-cheerleading; Ken White elaborates (Senior Editor Warren Gibson has also touched on this before)
  3. What if Mengele cured cancer? Bryan Caplan (who else?) asks the question
  4. Another law professor from Fordham, Nicholas Johnson, has a great post on The Bad Gun Dumpster
  5. Negroes and the Gun: Non-violent Winchesters and the fine art of concealed carry in the modern civil rights movement; Another, newer post by Mr Johnson elaborating upon one of the concepts in his new book

African development and mismeasuring economies (two separate topics)

Sorry I’ve been away for so long. I’ve been much busier than I wanted to be. I’ve been reading an essay by an economic anthropologist (Keith Hart) on African development that is definitely worth your time, though be sure to grab a cup of coffee first.

I liked this blog post from economist Ed Dolan on GDP versus GDP per capita measurements (I myself like to use the GDP (PPP) per capita measurement).

Addendum: Be sure to read Warren’s blog post on informal economies in the post-colonial world before reading the economic anthropologist’s essay. Warren’s post is a great primer for the topic.

New issue of Econ Journal Watch is out

You can find it here, and here is the summary:

One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Summer: In a 2014 AER article, Zacharias Maniadis, Fabio Tufano, and John List grapple with the problem of the credibility of empirical results by presenting a framework for statistical inference. Here Mitesh Kataria discusses some of the assumptions and restrictions of their framework and simulation, suggesting that their results do not, in fact, allow for general recommendations about which inference approach is most appropriate. Maniadis, Tufano, and List reply to Kataria.

Should the modernization hypothesis survive the research of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James Robinson, and Pierre Yared? New evidence and analysis is provided by Hugo Faria, Hugo Montesinos-Yufa, and Daniel Morales, supporting the hypothesis that there is a long-run positive relation between socio-economic development and political democracy.

Ill-Conceived, Even If Competently Administered: In a 2013 JEP article, Stuart Graham and Saurabh Vishnubhakat argue that the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is doing a good job of interpreting patent law, and suggest that the “smart phone wars” and related disputes are not evidence that the patent system is broken. Here Shawn Miller and Alexander Tabarrok argue that the main problem is not with the PTO but with patent law as it has been applied, particularly to software, resulting in patents that are overly broad and ambiguous, and hence vexing and stifling.

Ragnar Frisch and NorwayArild Sæther and Ib Eriksen contend that for several decades bad policy derived in part from the climate of opinion among the country’s eminent economists.

The ideological evolution of Milton FriedmanLanny Ebenstein explores developments in Friedman’s thinking, particularly after the mid-1950s.

EJW AudioLanny Ebenstein on Milton Friedman’s Ideological Evolution

I might add that notewriter Fred Foldvary is an Editor for the journal, and notewriter Warren Gibson is its math reader, so give the newest issue some family love!

Around the Web

  1. Reading Tocqueville in Qatar and at Georgetown
  2. Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism: Blame Nationalism for Both
  3. The Issue of Selective Prosecution
  4. Eric Prince: Out of Blackwater and into China; The WSJ‘s weekend interview with the founder of Blackwater is particularly good. If you hit a paywall, just copy and paste the title and enter it into your Google search bar. Click on the first link and voila.
  5. A short history of economic anthropology (grab a cup of coffee first)
  6. The market may be colorblind, but politics isn’t: Race, class and economic opportunity