December 20, 2009 12:40 AM, by Bryan Caplan) I zoomed through Kling-Schulz's From Poverty to Prosperity. The honest truth: It is the best book I've read all year, and the best book of interviews with economists ever written. If you're

December 20, 2009 12:27 AM, by Bryan Caplan) The quote was from DeLong's rave review of The Accidental Theorist. The next sentence reads:But all these are outweighed by one fact: he is almost always--not always, but almost always--right.Even in 1999,

December 19, 2009 06:19 PM, by Arnold Kling) Read Scott Sumner's post. I would distill it as arguing that macroeconomics and monetary theory follow a cyclical pattern. 1. During good times, such as the Great Moderation, a view develops that

December 19, 2009 03:48 PM, by Bryan Caplan) "Critics of Paul Krugman call him acerbic and boastful, unfair on the attack and unwilling to make concessions on the defense, certain that he is correct, and always sure that those who

December 19, 2009 03:23 PM, by Bryan Caplan) Maybe I'm just misinterpreting this passage, but I feel the need to correct one of my favorite textbook authors. Alex Tabarrok writes:A fall in wages increases the incentive to hire (call this

December 19, 2009 02:16 PM, by Bryan Caplan) Penny: He's a really good-looking guy, and I thought he was kind of cheesy at first... Billy: [quietly] Trust your instincts. Penny: But, he turned out to be totally sweet. Sometimes people

December 19, 2009 12:56 AM, by Bryan Caplan) Many people I know objected to my last post on Hayek. Arnold jokingly called me a troll. My colleague Russ Roberts urged me to learn greater patience:Five blog posts, huh? I guess

December 18, 2009 04:51 PM, by David Henderson) Some of the commenters on my post on Ayn Rand didn't like the fact that the book I discussed revealed some of the pretty-negative parts of Ayn Rand's character. One commenter, Brianna,

December 18, 2009 01:51 PM, by David Henderson) A junior colleague of mine, Noah Myung, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cal Tech, told me the following hilarious story. He was a math/econ major at UCLA and had just

December 18, 2009 07:26 AM, by Arnold Kling) Joshua Aizenman and Nancy Marion write, The estimated impact of inflation on today's debt/GDP ratio is larger than in the mid-1970s but not as large as in the mid-1940s. If inflation were

December 18, 2009 07:16 AM, by Arnold Kling) I should have outsourced my comments on John Allison's interview to Scott Sumner....

December 17, 2009 05:27 PM, by Bryan Caplan) Greg Clark's not gonna like this:Poor and war-torn, Sudan might be the last place you would expect to find an experiment in cutting-edge fertility treatments. But by the end of October, a

December 17, 2009 10:59 AM, by Arnold Kling) The Boston Globe reports on a site that posts students' notes on faculty lectures. Several professors, including the English professor and writer Louis Menand and the economist Greg Mankiw, have refused. Mankiw

December 17, 2009 10:57 AM, by Arnold Kling) Kevin Carey writes, The average graduation rate at four-year colleges in the bottom half of the Barron's taxonomy of admissions selectivity is only 45 percent. And that's just the average-at scores of

December 17, 2009 08:30 AM, by Arnold Kling) My position on breaking up banks generates questions from two groups. Libertarians ask, how can I justify breaking up private sector institutions? Naive liberals ask, why is this policy not embraced by

December 17, 2009 12:10 AM, by Bryan Caplan) The first surrogate mother contracts outraged the public. Now, almost no one cares - except the satisfied parties to these mutually advantageous arrangements. What happened? Elizabeth Scott of Columbia Law School has

December 16, 2009 08:37 PM, by Bryan Caplan) Arnold and Nick's From Poverty to Prosperity is an immediate delight. I'm only on page 4, and I'm already cracking up. Here is economic wit:Sixty years ago, a social studies teacher looking

December 16, 2009 08:12 PM, by Bryan Caplan) A while back, I wrote:Yes, health insurance is bundled with jobs. But markets bundle lots of products, and I see no evidence that this bundling undermines reputational incentives in the least. Think

December 16, 2009 03:29 PM, by Arnold Kling) Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps writes a long interesting article. Excerpts and my comments below the fold....

December 16, 2009 01:53 PM, by Bryan Caplan) Paul Krugman repeats his argument that wage cuts are an individually rational but socially destructive way to reduce unemployment. His motive: To quash a politically impossible effort to cut the minimum wage.