"In Praise of Theory"
"Economics is the Dope of the Religious People"
China: the land of dodgy statistics
Why the US and UK do not save for a rainy day
The World’s Stupidest Fatwas
Criminal interest
Even I do not get terribly excited by the typical economics paper (a recent example picked at random: “Consumption and Labour Supply with Partial Insurance: An Analytical Framework”). But a couple of recent titles grabbed me and, much as I wanted to, I couldn’t look away.
One was “An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization”, while the other was the more sobering “Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles”. Very different pieces of research, but both inhabit the tiny niche of the economics of crime.
The Pirates’ Code;
When Bob Dylan sang, “To live outside the law you must be honest,” he probably wasn’t thinking of seventeenth-century pirate captains. Nonetheless, his dictum seems to apply to them. While pirates were certainly cruel and violent criminals, pirate ships were hardly the floating tyrannies of popular imagination. As a fascinating new paper (pdf) by Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, and “The Republic of Pirates,” a new book by Colin Woodard, make clear, pirate ships limited the power of captains and guaranteed crew members a say in the ship’s affairs. The surprising thing is that, even with this untraditional power structure, pirates were, in Leeson’s words, among “the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.”
Political Pseudoscience
John Lott, Loaded
Keeping up with the Gateses?
Fair Trade with 17th-Century Portugal
Who Wants to Be a Cultural Billionaire?
A World of Wonders according to Tyler Cowan
Harry Potter: the economics;
Yet in the Potter books, the costs and limits are too often arbitrary.
A patronus charm, for example, is awfully difficult - until Rowling wants a stirring scene in which Harry pulls together an intrepid band of students to Fight the Power, whereupon it becomes simple enough to be taught by an inexperienced fifteen year old. Rowling can only do this because it's thoroughly unclear how magic power is acquired. It seems hard to credit academic labour, when spells are one or two words; and anyway, if that were the determinant, Hermione Granger would be a better wizard than Harry. But if it's something akin to athletic skill, why is it taught at rows of desks? And why aren't students worn out after practicing spells?
The low opportunity cost attached to magic spills over into the thoroughly unbelievable wizard economy. Why are the Weasleys poor? Why would any wizard be? Anything they need, except scarce magical objects, can be obtained by ordering a house elf to do it, or casting a spell, or, in a pinch, making objects like dinner, or a house, assemble themselves. Yet the Weasleys are poor not just by wizard standards, but by ours: they lack things like new clothes and textbooks that should be easily obtainable with a few magic words. Why?
The answer, as with so much of JK Rowling's work, seems to be "she didn't think it through". The details are the great charm of Rowling's books, and the reason that I have pre-ordered my copy of the seventh novel: the owl grams, the talking portraits, the Weasley twins' magic tricks. But she seems to pay no attention at all to the big picture, so all the details clash madly with each other. It's the same reason she writes herself into plot holes that have to be resolved by making characters behave in inexplicable ways.
let’s put malcolm gladwell out of business
why does sociology have such a bad reputation?
As price goes up, so does demand
WHO's Healthcare Rankings, Part 3
Steve Jobs' Greatest Presentation
IPhone Flaw Lets Hackers Take Over
The growth of nations;
The contrast between South Korea and India raised the biggest questions in economics: why have some countries succeeded with development and others failed? Why has Korea jumped from poverty to prosperity in a lifetime? Why did India do badly then, but much better recently?.
The broad question is the one Erik Reinert states in his title: How Rich Countries Got Rich... and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor. Reinert is a Norwegian professor who now teaches at Tallinn, Estonia. Ha-Joon Chang, a well-known Korean development economist, teaches at Cambridge. But both give strikingly similar answers to this question
The "mad scientist" of globalization
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