- Permanent War versus Peace; Professor Angelo Codevilla elaborates
- 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)
- What if Mengele cured cancer? Bryan Caplan (who else?) asks the question
- Another law professor from Fordham, Nicholas Johnson, has a great post on The Bad Gun Dumpster
- 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
Links
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 Norway: Arild 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 Friedman: Lanny Ebenstein explores developments in Friedman’s thinking, particularly after the mid-1950s.
EJW Audio: Lanny 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
- Reading Tocqueville in Qatar and at Georgetown
- Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism: Blame Nationalism for Both
- The Issue of Selective Prosecution
- 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.
- A short history of economic anthropology (grab a cup of coffee first)
- The market may be colorblind, but politics isn’t: Race, class and economic opportunity
Around the Web
- Recent Mexican reforms and the impact on the United States. From Gary Becker.
- Is the Pope’s Capitalism Catholic? Read this for the concise history lesson on Argentina rather than for the Pope’s opinion about public policy.
- Sandy Ikeda asks: Who is really threatened by innovation? Rick’s recent musing on political entrepreneurs can also shed some light on Ikeda’s question.
- The Liberty Constitution, Or, What About Slavery? Some libertarian legal theory for dat ass.
- “Diplomacy.” A transcript of Rand Paul’s recent speech on US foreign policy.
- Why the world needs more globalization, not less.
David Theroux’s latest on Secular Theocracy, Part 2
“Duck Dynasty and the Secular Theocracy, Part 2”
Part 1 can be found here. For more Secular Theocracy as a concept, start here. David founded the Independent Institute, a highly-regarded think tank in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the summer after my first semester of college (2009; I started college in Feb of 2009 after hanging out in Ghana – long story!) I had the opportunity to attend the Independent Institute’s summer seminar for students.
In fact, that summer I attended four seminars put on by various libertarian think tanks and the Institute’s was the first of the summer. I really, really enjoyed it and was able to make some lifelong connections. For example, Dr Foldvary – the co-founder of this blog – was one of the lecturers there. Here is the Institute’s main web site.
Around the Web: Highly Recommended Reading Edition
- Fantastic post about Uganda’s role (and a Ugandan’s perspective) in the ongoing South Sudan conflict.
- Sexual mores: Love in a cold climate. I live in California, but my ancestors come from the frozen wastelands of Scandinavia and northern Germany. Rawr!
- The unacknowledged success of neoliberalism.
- One of my favorite bloggers (Scott Sumner) is joining one of my favorite group blogs (EconLog). I’m a huuuuge fan of group blogs (they’re pretty much the only type of blog I read), so I hope he decides to stay on as a permanent contributor.
- Inglorious Revolutions. Why the West is kinda, sorta hypocritical when it comes to the Arab Spring.
2013: Thanks for a great year
Today marks NOL‘s third year of existence.
It’s been a great ride so far. Below are some of our most popular posts of the year, but first I’d like to highlight the new ventures of some of our guest bloggers over the year.
- Andrew Roth (here are his contributions to NOL) has a new project up that’s well worth your time, Murica Derp.
- Hank Moore (here are his contributions to NOL) has a new project up and running as well, The Libertarian Liquidationist, and you should definitely show him your support.
As far as top 2013 posts at NOL goes, here are some of the most read:
Guillermo Pineda’s post “El grave error del libertarianismo guatelmateco…” was the most most-read post of 2013.
Andrew Roth’s post “Impeach James Clapper” was also a viral hit and Fred Foldvary’s “New Mexico’s Police Breaking Badly” spent a few days at the top of /r/libertarian’s front page.
Warren Gibson’s “Open Season on White Males” was his most popular 2013 post, and his 2012 post on “…Raising the Minimum Wage” went viral.
New notewriters Adam Magoon’s “Debunking the Wage Slavery Myth” and LA Repucci’s “Statists applaud death of unarmed mother…” garnered a lot of reads and our Russian correspondent’s (Evgeniy) debut post “Just to say hello” was wildly popular as well.
Judging by the amount of reads Jacques Delacroix’s post on “Unequal Poverty…” received, I think it’s safe to say that it proved to be controversial, and Payam Ghorbanian’s guest post on the recent Iranian nuclear talks garnered the most reactions.
Rick, Audrey, Michael, Tibor, Jesper, Matthew, Claudio and guest author Peter Miller all put in valuable time to contribute to a better understanding of liberty and freedom. Our third year is going to be our best yet, so don’t go anywhere!
Around the Web
- An Israeli (grad student) and an Iranian (grad student) on the way forward
- An Anarchist’s Proposal for Limited Constitutional Government
- Red White: Why a Founding Father of Postwar Capitalism (Keynesianism) Spied for the Soviets
- Is Fascism Returning to Europe?
- Freedom of Speech: True and False (Duck Dynasty edition)
Around the Web
This is the 69th installment of ‘Around the Web’. Giggity!
- guaranteed income vs. open borders; Economist Kevin Grier weighs the options
- How poverty taxes the brain; A sexy-sounding female gives us the low-down
- The origins of Northwest European ‘guilt culture’; Evolutionary anthropologists are so, soooo cute
- The ‘thoughtful libertarian’ subreddit; Finally!
- Is Christmas efficient? Only an economist (Tyler Cowen) could ask such a thing
- God, Hayek and the Conceit of Reason; Concise essay by Jonathan Neumann in Standpoint
- Milton Friedman’s 1997 musings on a common currency in the European Union: The Euro: From monetary policy to political disunity
Around the Web
- The media’s shooting bias. An excellent take on the hypocrisy of the media. (read David Henderson’s take, too)
- Conservation Native American style (grab a cup of coffee)
- The mission to decentralize the internet; interesting argument, though I don’t think the internet is as centralized as the author makes it out to be.
- Doug Bandow on North Korea’s ongoing purges
- Blast from the past: What did Marxism look like in Mozambique in the 1980s?
Great (new?) resource for historical economic data
UC Davis’s Global Price and Income History Group has a new website up (at least I think it’s new) and it’s got a lot of really, really good data. (h/t again goes to contributing editor Claudio Shikida)
Around the Web: Globalization, Racism and Surfing
- Check out this fascinating reddit thread on ‘blackness’ in the US and the UK. As somebody who has spent a fair amount of time outside of the US, and who is interested in ethnicity from a scholarly perspective, the answers were nothing new to me, but it’s always nice when the streets confirm your suspicions.
- A beautiful photo essay on surfing in Liberia. I wish there were a traditional essay to go along with the photos, but it still suffices.
I think there are too many people in the world who don’t think hard enough about the benefits of globalization (i.e. world trade). As populism continues to gain traction here in the US (and elsewhere I presume), I fear that the everyday beauty a more globalized world gives to us will be thrown under the bus in the name of The People.
Free Trade in Asia
When you get the chance, check out this working paper on market integration and Asia during the 19th and early 20th centuries by David Chilosi and Giovanni Federico. The abstract:
This paper contributes to the debate on globalization and the great divergence with a comprehensive analysis of trends, causes and effects of the integration of Asia in the world market from 1800 to the eve of World War Two, based on a newly compiled data-set. The analysis finds that: most price convergence occurred before 1870, with only little disintegration in the inter-war years; market integration was determined to a large extent by the fall of Western trading monopolies; it implied significant static welfare gains and emerges as a major cause of substantial improvements in the terms of trade.
Again. the whole paper is worth reading. I think I might be more interested in it because of my own work on Dutch colonialism in southeast Asia and the collapse of the Dutch East Indies Company (a state-sponsored monopoly). With that being said, the paper is one of those “big picture” reads that folks of all disciplines ought to be interested in.
One of the most interesting aspects I found in the paper had to do with foreign trade. It has become popular nowadays to focus on institutions within a society for explanations on why some nations are rich and others are poor. This paper suggests that while institutions may be important, it is just not institutions that are careful to include domestic factions that are important for prosperity. The institutions that are created to deal with foreign affairs (mostly trade and diplomacy) also play an important role in the health and wealth of societies. (h/t goes to co-blogger Claudio Shikida)
