Archive | June, 2004

For longer than I care to admit, I’ve been working on an economic theory of suicide. (If you actually read the paper, I encourage you to skip the empirical section, which still needs lots of work.) Other economists have tackled the issue of suicide, though the field is still dominated by psychologists and sociologists. Oddly, […]

In my posting on almost-recursive acronyms, I noted that the company Cygnus, whose name expands to “Cygnus, Your GNU Support,” was not guilty of what I referred to as acronym stacking. This is the name I give to an acronym including a letter that abbreviates a different acronym; as I like to think of it, […]

I’m always skeptical about whether petitions – especially online petitions – ever have any effect whatsoever. They’re probably even less meaningful than online polls, which is to say, hardly meaningful at all except as a measure of how much publicity they got in certain circles. But at least I agree with this one, which says […]

On Balkanization Jack Balkin offers an insightful analysis of why Bill Clinton was reviled by so many Republicans: Clinton understood that the Democrats could get back in the White House if they appealed to parts of the coalition of voters that had elected Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And so he set out consciously […]

For the coming school year, home-schooled debaters will be tackling the resolution, “That the United States should change its energy policy to substantially reduce its dependence on foreign oil.” I’ll be speaking at a home schoolers’ debate camp later this summer, which gives me an incentive to become better informed about this important subject. But […]

I believe that Cass is describing a very real social phenomenon. There surely are, and have always been, some positions or “norms” that are sufficiently “beyond the mainstream” as to disqualify someone from national office. These norms are “effectively binding” in the sense that one publicly disavows them at one’s peril. While these norms remain […]

Thanks to Randy Barnett, and assorted emailers, for excellent questions and comments about constitutive commitments and FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. Constitutive commitments first: They’re not part of the formal constitution and they’re certainly not for judicial enforcement. They nonetheless matter, because they have sufficiently wide and deep political support that they’re effectively binding — […]

The Manhattan Institute has launched a new civil justice reform blog, PointOfLaw.com. I will be a contributor, posting occasionally on issues such as the admissibility of expert testimony (while I’m on-topic, if your law firm doesn’t have a copy of The New Wigmore: Expert Evidence, now is the time to correct that oversight). My posts […]

Last week, I attended a Liberty Fund conference on “Liberty & Diversity,” where I met historian David Beito and conspirator David Bernstein, among many others. Interestingly, I was the only economist in the bunch, which may have given me a peculiar perspective (it usually does). These are some of my thoughts, which I expressed at […]

Apropos of my post on the virtue of inactivity in politics, reader Carl Edman emailed me the following quotation: “[Titus Antoninus Pius’s] reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” — Edward Gibbon, […]

Someone I know once told me, I like to peoplewatch.” In May 2003, a gossip column had a quotation from Ashton Kutcher, concerning a party that George W. Bush’s daughters had attended at his place in 2001. Kutcher said, The Bushes were underage drinking at my house. These two sentences caught my ear because of […]

Via Matthew Yglesias, this interesting N.Y. Times story discussing the fact that a disproportionately large percentage of “African American” students at Harvard (and other elite colleges) are actually of recent African or West Indian heritage, or are of mixed race. One interesting aspect of the article is that those who argue that Harvard should be […]

In his recent post, Cass invokes the concept of a “constitutive commitment,” by which he means something more than “a policy” and something less than “a constitutional requirement.” I take it that he would distinguish between constitutive commitments and Ackermanian ethereal unwritten constitutional amendments adopted during so-called “constitutional moments.” But (rousing myself reluctantly from a […]

Tyler links to an article (warning: as Tyler says, it’s PG-13) about Japan’s recent ban on the sale of soiled panties by underaged girls. Apparently some Japanese men – enough to create a thriving market – like to acquire the used panties for erotic purposes. I let the story about a guy auctioning off his […]

As Prof. Sunstein’s illuminating posts have reminded us, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a man of purposeful action and sweeping vision. But is that necessarily a good thing? The lionization of presidents with ambitious policies and ideas biases our historical perspective, as Gene Healy reminds us in this excellent book review. Interesting presidents give us better […]