I’m always a little puzzled by a rhetorical strategy I occasionally encounter in friendly political arguments. I’ll often, unsurprisingly enough, end up taking a libertarian position, and midway through the back-and-forth, my interlocutor will respond with something like: “Well, you’re a libertarian, so of course you think that, but…” as if to suggest that an […]

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Speaking of Glen, he’s got a nice, Seuss inspired analysis of two kinds of “games” driving patronage at bars and other social spots. Which makes me think of a devious way an unscrupulous bar owner could undermine his competitors. Say you’ve got a spot you’re trying to market to one of several self-segregating demographics—following Glen, […]

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Neal Whitman, brother of ex-roomie-cum-econoblogger Glen Whitman, has launched his own linguistics blog, Literal-Minded. Check it.

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I’ve been reading a lot of different books recently that talk about the problem (well, sometimes they’re good, but sometimes they’re a problem) of information cascades. And that got me thinking about Google searches. See, in the post below, I wanted to hyperlink the term reservation price, so non-econogeek types who might not recognize the […]

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Economics is all about preferences. We take for granted that we’ve got a set of goals, desires, and ends; the fun in the model is mostly about figuring out how more-or-less rational people fit means to those ends. And, maybe mostly as a simplifying assumption, we usually think of those as defined pretty precisely well […]

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Am I the only one a little mystified by the furor over the supposed debate on al-Qaeda connections to Iraq? As far as I can tell, the substantive stories being told are factually identical: To wit, everyone agrees that senior Iraqi officials and senior al-Qaeda officials met on various occasions. Woo-hoo. Nobody, as far as […]

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I’ve apparently got a trio of invites to hand out; first three people to email me get one. UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long… I’ve dispensed my three. Thanks for playing.

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I did, in fact, get outside this weekend (though with a group such that we couldn’t go boating without someone bringing a copy of The New Yorker along to read aloud while we swam), but I also saw quite a few movies. The less said about Matrix Revolutions the better. Saved! had its moments, but […]

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