2014-01-21

Some Links

Robin Hanson singles out a particular "anxiety du jour book," but what he says during the first half of the post might just as easily be a description of any non-fiction book sold for mass consumption. Malcolm Gladwell, I'm looking at you.

Livio Di Matteo asks whether remittances are a good thing. I say that they are.

Simon Grey takes the modern public school teaching system to task. He is quick to account for exceptions seems to be talking about broad trends, which I think even most school teachers would agree with.

On the other hand, I'm not sure where he's going with all this wife-obeys-husband business, but I disagree.

Further to my recent post on Natural Numbers, Lubos Motl has more than you could ever wish to know about the sum of all positive integers. Note how he phrases it. He doesn't say "the sum of all Natural Numbers." It's not clear to me that this was a conscious decision on his part, but it serves to buttress my point a bit.

A career politician is a pathological liar? I did not see that coming. (HT to Mungowitz.) You see, politics is the new religion, and I'm not the first one to have pointed that out. But when I see stories like this, the first name that pops into my head is Paul H. Dunn (seriously, read it).

Scott Sumner at EconLog again. I can't tell whether or not this kind of thing is worth reading. He clearly understands that, at the microeconomic level, income variation is natural. But where I'd use that knowledge to conclude that NGDP isn't something to be level-targeted - because, you know, people do all kinds of economic stuff for all kinds of reasons, and a nation-wide trend need not necessarily be "fixed" - Sumner reaches the opposite conclusion. FWIW, here is the Anonymous Charmer on Sumner.

Speaking of stuff that makes my eyes glaze over, when people start talking about "institutions," I just lose it. "Institutions" are the new "emergence." This may be worth a post in the not-too-distant future.

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