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How to Solve Chicago’s Violent Crime Problem

If you want to ruin your day, check out this article from yesterday’s WSJ on the violence plaguing some of Chicago’s schools: The videotaped beating death of a 16-year-old boy who wandered into a street brawl is focusing attention once again on how dangerous it is to be a teenager in Chicago.…An image from a […]

Search Engines Today, Foreheads Tomorrow

Does anyone else find Google’s barcode logo a bit creepy? Or is it just an evangelical Christian hangup?

Geithner Lectures Americans on Saving More

The audacity of these people is astonishing: “Everyone is going to have to come to terms with the fact that we are going to save more in the United States,” Geithner said in an interview with German weekly Die Zeit, conducted on Sunday in Istanbul, and due to appear on Oct. 8. “If the U.S. […]

Workers Would Rather Quit Than Be Laid Off

That’s it, that’s all you need, to answer the Nobelist’s query. You don’t need to list papers on “factors of confidence and option value,” “sticky information,” etc. etc., except insofar as those opaque phrases mean, “Workers would rather quit than be laid off.” It also doesn’t really have anything to do with the timing. Let […]

Two Items on Drug Legalization

Since I’ve been discussing the issue, two items: * Mark Thornton passed along NORML’s estimate of the fiscal benefits to California’s government if they legalized marijuana. (Note I haven’t reviewed their study so I don’t know if it’s any good. If this were a blog devoted to cheap jokes, I would say something like, “I […]

Scott Sumner’s Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Milton Friedman gave us many gifts, but among his undesirable ones was income tax withholding. He also gave an erroneous explanation of the Great Depression, namely that the timid Fed didn’t pump in enough monetary base to prevent disaster. In addition to giving Bernanke the intellectual justification to destroy the dollar, Friedman’s theory has body-snatched […]

Gold Sets Record High; EPJ Explains Plot Against Dollar

Gold hit a record high today, trading at $1,040.15 / ounce. I’m not being a wiseguy; has Mish or another prominent deflationist explained this? If you want to read up on the international conspiracy against the greenback, EPJ has the latest. Is that the out that Mish et al. will take? “Yes, the dollar should […]

Kling’s Critics

I’m sorry kids but I just don’t have the energy to do this justice. So let me give you the quick rundown: * Arnold Kling has been pushing his “recalculation argument” concerning the recession and fiscal stimulus. (Here’s an early, though not the first, post on the topic.) The idea is that we need a […]