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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My hopes of seeing Watchmen on the silver screen are apparently dashed for the time being.

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The Pope says Americans are in danger of succumbing to a “soulless vision of life.” One hopes. The article has him arguing that “the U.S. church must study contemporary culture to find a way to appeal to youths.” Have these guys talked to Tom Lerher?

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Wonkette sarcasto-fisks the shit out of Michelle Malkin. Snarkalicious.

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Amitai Etzioni makes a point about public intellectuals that’s occasionally flitted through my head, with respect to the academic as well as the punditocratic realm. It seems that, from the point of view of establishing a reputation, you’re sometimes better off for being interestingly wrong than exactly right. I think part of Rawls’s fame has […]

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I just saw a midnight showing of The Day After Tomorrow, the mother-of-all-disaster-flicks that MoveOn is billing (with help from Al Gore) as “the movie George Bush doesn’t want you to see.” Cato’s house global warming contrarian Pat Michaels took it seriously enough to pen a Washington Post piece denouncing the flick. Having seen it, […]

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