This and That

The Brain on the Stand ;

I. Mr. Weinstein’s Cyst When historians of the future try to identify the moment that neuroscience began to transform the American legal system, they may point to a little-noticed case from the early 1990s. The case involved Herbert Weinstein, a 65-year-old ad executive who was charged with strangling his wife, Barbara, to death and then, in an effort to make the murder look like a suicide, throwing her body out the window of their 12th-floor apartment on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. Before the trial began, Weinstein’s lawyer suggested that his client should not be held responsible for his actions because of a mental defect — namely, an abnormal cyst nestled in his arachnoid membrane, which surrounds the brain like a spider web.

Higher-Ed Superpower

This "education power" may be the best long-term hope for dealing with U.S. troubles abroad. Global polls show that after the Iraq debacle, the rest of the world mistrusts America and its values. But there is one striking exception to this anti-Americanism, and that is education. American-style universities, colleges and schools are sprouting up around the world

Prizes, Not Patents by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Bayesian Analysis of Hypocrisy

Ignoring subsidies -Donald J. Boudreaux

The Future of Leisure That Never Arrived - Hal Varian

Luckily, the Survey Research Center at the University of Maryland conducted a survey in 1985 in which people were asked to rate how much they enjoyed various activities on a scale of 1 to 10. “Sex” came in first, with a score of 9.3, followed by “sports” at 9.2. “Housecleaning” is near the bottom of the list, with a score of 4.9.

Fearless Financial Markets by J. Bradford DeLong

The Hedge Fund Hegemon by Kenneth Rogoff

The Bare Minimum

The Earned Income Tax Credit is a federal tax refund for workers, who qualify based on family income rather than individual income or wages. This means that an upper-class teenager working at McDonald’s will not get a benefit, but someone trying to support a family will. Over the last 15 years, the credit’s subsidy rates have increased and the definition of eligibility has broadened. These expansions have greatly improved labor force participation among single mothers

Gordon Tullock — The Champion of Virginia Public Choice

Paul Krugman: Overblown Personnel Matters

Crisis Looms in Market for Mortgages

Lotto Makes Sense, Even for Losers

Large rewards make most people reckless, whether they’re on the winning or losing end. A 2003 University of Vermont study found that lottery players who said they preferred to receive potential winnings in annuity payments — generally thought to be safer than receiving the money all at once, in a lump sum — often changed their minds when they actually won. And the higher the jackpot, the more likely people were to prefer a lump-sum payout, the researchers found.

Information = access = money

Monetary Policy and the Great Depression

Global Warming: What Role for Economics?

‘The Iraq War Is Not Taking Place’

"Psychology of evil" professor delivers final Stanford lecture

The retiring psychology professor who ran the famed Stanford Prison Experiment savagely criticized the Bush administration's War on Terror Wednesday and said senior government officials should be tried for crimes against humanity.

In his final lecture at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo said abuses committed by Army reservists at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison weren't isolated incidents by rogue soldiers. Rather, sadism was the inevitable result of U.S. government policies that condone brutality toward enemies, he said.

Pictures, Statistics and Genocide

At the annual meeting last month of the American Association for Advancement of Science, Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, recommended a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention. He offered two related reasons. The first is that it has been completely ineffective, and the second is that it doesn't accord well with our human tendency to be moved by dramatic individual tragedies and unmoved by mass killings.

The sentiment is not new. Stalin famously noted, "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."

Wind Chill Blows

The Theory of the Leisure Class

Watching share prices will not make you happy

Maybe good looks do make you smarter

Institutions Matter: Somaliland Edition

On On the Wealth of Nations

Who Are The God Experts?

Accounting: A Brief History