Author Archive | David Bernstein

The subject [of their book on the Israel lobby] will certainly prompt furious debate, though not at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a Jewish cultural center in Washington and three organizations in Chicago. They have all turned down […]

N.Y. Times: The median price of American homes is expected to fall this year for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950. Economists say the decline, which could be foreshadowed in a widely followed government price index to be released this week, will probably be modest — from 1 percent […]

Allowing individuals to deduct the interest they pay on their mortgages and home equity loans, no matter what, but not on regular loans, must rank up there with the worst public policy moves of all time. The rationale for allowing tax deductions of mortgage interest payments is to encourage home ownership, which is reasonably thought […]

I recently came across the following quote on the Internet, attributed to Ariel Sharon in 1988: “You don’t simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away. I prefer to advocate a more positive policy… to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave.” The quotation is used, […]

Awesome video.

While the new Arabic language school in Brooklyn has attracted national headlines and controversy, far less has been written about a new English-Hebrew language public charter school in South Florida. The school’s principal is a rabbi, the food in the cafeteria is kosher, and there are allegations that the school is intended to be a […]

The New York Times has an article about controversy over Professor Michael Bailey’s book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, which reaches some rather politically incorrect conclusions about the reasons some men want to undergo sex changes. Two quotations in the story caught my eye. First, Deirdre (formerly Donald) McCloskey, a well-known (formerly?) libertarian economist, […]

Tim Sandefur on a very interesting pending 9th Circuit case, in which the court will have to decide whether an occupational regulation that the government’s own expert deems irrational is nevertheless constitutional. Sandefur also addresses the right to earn an honest living more generally. I wasn’t aware that the 10th Circuit held in 2004 that […]

Researchers in Iowa subjected children to emotional abuse in the 1930s, in an attempt to prove a theory about stuttering. Almost seventy years later, the “children” sued. Surely, the state would be acting properly to voluntarily compensate the victims in some way. But a lawsuit seventy years later, when almost all the perpetrators and many […]

A federal judge has denied the FTC’s request for an injunction to block the proposed merger between Whole Foods and Wild Oats. I was just telling co-conspirator Todd today that I thought that the FTC’s theory in this case–that there is an organic and premium food grocery market separate from the regular grocery store market, […]

[David Bernstein, January 17, 2006 at 9:14am] Trackbacks Housing Bubble is Really a Credit Bubble? I’ve seen some persuasive evidence, both scholarly and anecdotal, that a major factor driving the “housing bubble” is historically loose credit standards: no money-down (or even negative money down) mortgages, cursory (or even non-existent!) checks of reported income levels, qualification […]

Last year, I wrote a post noting that homebuilder CEOs had received huge compensation packages in 2005. I argued that such compensation was a result of a booming industry resulting from macro factors beyond the CEO’s control, and not individual performance, and this signified problems with the way executive compensation is structured. I mentioned Lennar, […]

Last week, I was in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, a Gulf Coast town devastated by Katrina. I was stunned by how much damage remains two years after Katrina: people living in trailers where their homes used to be, tin roofs (or no roofs), wood blocks where windows used to be, exposed foundations where homes used […]

The labor pains were coming, so Jessica Hodges got going. The 26-year-old bank teller from Burke sped toward Inova Fairfax Hospital, but before she got there, the law got her — 57 mph in a 35 zone. Reckless driving. Hodges’s labor pains subsided — they turned out to be a false alarm — but the […]

A while back, I met someone at a party, an engineer, who told me he worked for a defense contractor that thrives on earmarks. As he described it, so far none of the products he’d worked on was actually being used, and many of them didn’t even work. He told me that two things happen […]