An article criticizing undergraduate business majors and defending the liberal arts: now that’s more than I can resist.
I kid you not: someone else has blogged about backing into parking spaces. Many comments on the blog cite safety concerns, but I’m not convinced that’s the real cause. Read and see for yourself.
As part of my daily commute to Arlington, I park in a garage at the Largo Metro Station. According to the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority this garage has 2,200 parking spaces.
As I occupied one of the few remaining spaces this morning, I noticed something strange; I was one of the only commuters who hadn’t backed into my space. This [...]
The market for PCs has been marked by increasing competition over the years, resulting in much lower prices for IBM clones than comparable Macintosh computers. Apple’s introduction of the budget-priced Macbook line of laptops seems like a wise move to attract that segment of the demand curve unwilling to pay a premium for aesthetics. This [...]
I saw an amusing analogy for one of the most common arguments in favor of the minimum wage over at Cafe Hayek this morning:
The market prices of most used-cars are too low for sellers of those cars to support their families. This fact is especially true for poor people, who, when they sell their old [...]
It seems that every day now the media uncover new evidence of corruption by our elected officials, making a new study by economists Peter Leeson and Russel Sobel especially timely. Their explanation: corruption can be blamed on the weather. Before you start screaming “spurious regression!” I should clarify; the researchers don’t assert that bad weather causes corruption, rather that it makes corruption easier. Who would have [...]
An interesting note from the intersection of Economics and Politics:
Today I emailed the World Bank to find out why their database lacked GDP figures for Taiwan. A response promptly arrived: “see this website.” It seems China will not allow the World Bank to keep GDP figures for Taiwan as this implies that Taiwan is an [...]
A recent Gallup Poll suggests that Republicans may have some trouble hanging on the the majority this fall. Only 31% of those surveyed plan to vote for a Republican candidate in the coming elections versus 51% who plan to vote for a Democratic candidate
Sure, but what do the markets think? The online betting market Tradesports.com [...]
A very interesting news item: http://www.iwr.co.uk/information-world-review/news/2157860/aap-science-publishers-club
Here’s my initial reaction (possibly ill-concieved). Basic research is supposed to be a public good, hence government funding. It seems strange, then, that the results of publicly-funded research should be made excludable by allowing journals to charge.
The publishers seem to think that this legislation reduces incentives for publication and peer [...]
