11 Oct 2013

Potpourri

Climate Change, Conspiracy, David R. Henderson, Economics, Humor, Krugman, Oil, Potpourri, Steve Landsburg 20 Comments

==> I think President Obama should read from this website in celebration of Columbus Day, in order to win over Sean Hannity.

==> My favoriet go-to guy for climate science is Chip Knappenberger. Here’s his archive at Cato. In particular, y’all should be aware of the skullduggery in the latest IPCC report (AR5), in which they hem and haw about the fact that almost all of their models overpredicted the actual amount of warming that occurred during the last 15 years. And here’s Roger Pielke Jr. on the attempt to associate “extreme” climate events with human emissions. This one is not even close; even the IPCC doesn’t try to make the case, so you’d think people in the media and government would drop it. But don’t worry: By the year 2047 we will have definitive proof, according to a new study; so let’s go ahead and tax carbon.

==> John Cochran (not the Chicago John Cochrane with an “e”) has a good article on stimulus at Mises.org.

==> Jeremy Hammond, Steve Landsburg, and David R. Henderson all jump on Krugman for various things.

==> In a liquidity trap, it’s expansionary when the Post Office destroys stamps.

==> This is why I didn’t go into modeling.

==> An interesting post from Gene Callahan on Mises and Hayek.

==> Did I ever mention that I can’t stand Neil deGrasse Tyson?

==> Not even military officials give disinformation about ninjas.

20 Responses to “Potpourri”

  1. Blackadder says:

    Re: Neil deGrasse Tyson, his third book recommendation is as follows:

    3.) On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (eBook – Audio Book) – “to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth.”

    Wouldn’t one technically need to read The Descent of Man in order to learn this?

    • Bob Murphy says:

      And anyway, he already recommended the Bible, which contains Genesis, so this seems redundant.

  2. Ken B says:

    I well know you didn’t go into OLG modelling.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      There’s nothing I would like more than to blow you up with math, Ken, but it’s the kind of thing where it would take me a good hour (at least) to really get back into that mindset, and I’m too busy to do that while I have deadlines hanging over me. So what I’m saying is, I’m ignoring you for months because I respect you as an opponent.

      • Daniel Kuehn says:

        It would be nice, if we ever got into this again, to do it with math.

        Excel-OLG models are surprisingly difficult to get right. That thing Grant discovered never would have been a problem if we just did it with math.

  3. Silas Barta says:

    Columbus day link: Yet another brave contrarian equivocates between:

    1) Everyone knew the earth was round

    2) The 0.01% of the population that was educated knew the earth was round.

    • Ken B says:

      And also as usual over the meaning of ‘discover’.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      When you use the word “brave” are you making fun of Native Americans?

    • Matt M (Dude Where's My Freedom) says:

      If your read towards the end, the guy readily identifies Howard Zinn as his primary source (and for that matter, parrots the standard celebratory propaganda of MLK and Lincoln).

  4. Jeremy R. Hammond says:

    Thanks for the mention!

  5. Robert Wenzel says:

    “=> This is why I didn’t go into modeling.”

    Bob,

    You are looking at this wrong, from an economics perspective. It is not what male models earn versus female models, but what you could earn as a male model versus your earnings as an economist.

    From that perspective, and you may be to humble to say this, it I think either career move would have made similar sense.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      No RW I’m saying once I went down that path, I would have been tempted to change my gender.

  6. Jason Bonner says:

    “Did I ever mention that I can’t stand Neil deGrasse Tyson?”

    The guy is the pits. Some how I stumbled upon his “mysteries of #Gravity” bit he did the other day on Twitter, pointing out all the problems of the movie. It was awful. I guess no one ever told him it wasn’t a documentary.

    • Ken B says:

      Yeah. When I read Bob’s backhanded praise for Tyson on a religion thread I thought, wow maybe I’ll like this guy!
      Nope. He’s the smug ugly atheist type that irks me as much as it does Bob.

  7. Tel says:

    http://catallaxyfiles.com/2013/10/10/the-cartoon-says-it-all/

    Minimum wage revisited… nothing we haven’t discussed here already.

  8. Major_Freedom says:

    The book that irks me most in his list is “The Wealth of Nations.”

    If we are to include a book that most influenced western thought on capitalism qua capitalism, it should be Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Far more influential than Wealth of Nations, and was a logical extension and politicization of the fundamental principle of The Wealth of Nations: The labor theory of value.

  9. Anonymous says:

    6.) The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (eBook – Audio Book) – “to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.”

    7.) The Art of War by Sun Tsu (eBook – Audio Book) – “to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art.”

    I find this pairing ironic.

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