Author Archive | glen

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

There are plenty of good arguments against the minimum wage, but I’m not persuaded by reductio arguments like this one: Kerry proposes that the legislated minimum wage reach $7.00 per hour in 2007. Why wait until then? If government can increase workers’ earnings by declaring in a statute that no worker shall be paid less […]

My sister Ellen alerted me to the case of Dave Vardy, who is trying to auction off what many guys would happily give away for free: his virginity. The starting bid is listed at over 6000 British pounds, though I can’t tell whether that’s his reserve price or someone has actually bid that much. I […]

In the course of my research, much of which relates to selection of legal and ethical decision rules, I’ve often pondered the meaning of the word “rule” itself. What does it actually mean to have a rule, or to be guided by one? The more I think about it, the more I think that a […]