Well, sorta.

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Chris Hayes: In last night’s excellent speech Obama mentioned receiving a donation from a woman in the form of a money order for $3.01 with a excerpt of scripture attached. One of Mark Kleinman’s commenters figured out the significance of the amount: Another reader provides what must surely be the answer to the puzzle: $3.01 […]

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Ezra Klein advances the Whiny Siblings model of transportation infrastructure funding: In answer to this, some conservatives suggest Amtrak should be able to stand on its own two feet. But is that fair? Last year, Congress appropriated $40 billion in highway funding — that goes to maintenance and new road construction. And a similar sum […]

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Paul Krugman (via

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Ezra links, in a spirit I think we can charitably call self-flattering, to Dani Roderik’s taxonomy of dismal scientists. “First-best economists” (we learn) decide public policy questions by “knee-jerk” application of simplistic, idealized models. “Second best economists”—who understand that the world is, like, complicated and stuff—are more amenable to targeted regulation. (Is there some kind […]

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Via Boing Boing, Afrobeat star Femi Kuti on trade, development, and high-profile benefit concerts in LA Weekly: Q: What’s your take on Bono and concerts like Live 8 that campaign on behalf of Africa? A: Bono doesn’t need to tell us that we are poor. We know we are poor. All these concerts come and […]

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An op-ed in The New York Times argues that the “orthodoxy of privatization — that it’s the government that’s mired by inefficiency and a lack of competition — has been turned on its head in the intelligence industry.” And fair enough, but it’s worth noting that the “orthodox” argument for the superior efficiency of the […]

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An article in Scientific American introduces an interesting game theoretic puzzle, the Travelers Dilemma, and proceeds to spin some truly bizarre political conclusions from it. First, the puzzle. Since the effect of the little accompanying story, to judge by the comments at Digg, is primarily to induce people who don’t understand game theory to say […]

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I think Ezra hits an important point vis a vis Chris Hayes’ piece on neoclassical and “heterodox” economists: In academic journals and whatnot, mainstream economists are perfectly willing to incorporate good ideas from “heterodox” researchers. When they’re writing op-eds and policy papers, they hew to a simpler “trade is good” line. One of Ezra’s commenters […]

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Chris Hayes has a long and somewhat muddled piece about “heterodox” economists in The Nation. The upshot is that an ossified neoclassical “mafia” is conspiring to marginalize people with all sorts of dissident views. (It could, mutatis mutandis, easily be a National Review piece on global warming skeptics.) But it’s a little tricky pinning down […]

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