The Financial Times runs a story today by Francesco Guerrera and Nicole Bullock on the looming problems of underfunded public pensions at the state and local level in the United States. The news story cites a new study by Orin Kramer, chairman of New Jersey’s pension fund: The estimate by Orin Kramer will fuel investors’ […]
Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson
Opinio Juris Discussion of Genetically Modified Food
Tommorrow, Tuesday, Opinio Juris will be hosting a one-day discussion of the new book by Gregory Shaffer and Mark Pollack, When Cooperation Fails: The International Law and Politics of Genetically Modified Foods (Oxford, 2009). Sungjoon Cho and Rebecca Bratspies will join with guest commentary. Stop on by!
Walter Russell Meade on Obama and – Hamilton, Wilson, Jefferson, and Jackson
Provocative, interesting essay by Walter Russell Meade in the latest Foreign Policy, The Carter Syndrome. It argues that Obama is a Jeffersonian in his foreign policy trying to come to grips with his Wilsonianism (“Barack Obama might yet revolutionize America’s foreign policy. But if he can’t reconcile his inner Thomas Jefferson with his inner Woodrow Wilson, […]
Cost-Benefit Analysis and Airline Security – A Query about Method
In the various discussions about airport and airline security here at VC, a common response in the comments is something like this one (some version of this pops up from many commenters, and I’m just pulling up the most convenient example): With the current procedures, flying is one of the safest things we do. Even […]
Saturdays with Stendhal 1
In the past, on other blogs, I have run a series called Sundays with Stendhal – quotes from the Master’s various writings. You either love it or you hate it. With the new year, I have decided to resurrect it – sometimes just quotes, sometimes with commentary. But I’ve decided to make it Saturdays with […]
Economists as Cheapskates? Law Professors as Conference Seekers of Golf and Surfing?
The Wall Street Journal has an entertaining article on the front page (Justin Lahart, Jan. 2, 2010), recounting tales of economists as hard bargainers and, well, cheapskates. The article opens noting that the annual professional meetings occur the week after New Year, when hotel costs are generally low, and this year are taking place in […]
Jim Manzi, ‘Keeping America’s Edge’
I am going into isolation for a bit to rewrite the last chapter in my UN book, “Returning to Earth: When and How the United States Should Engage, and Not Engage, with the United Nations” – a chapter on the end of the human rights era at the UN. But I wanted to wish everyone […]
The Year in Robotics 2009
Happy new year to everyone! H/T Instapundit, to this excellent story with many useful links by Kristina Grifantini, Tuesday, December 29, 2009, on various advances in robotics during 2009, from MIT’s Technology Review: In the past year, researchers have developed new robots to tackle a variety of tasks: helping with medical rehabilitation, aiding military maneuvers, mimicking […]
How Does Cost-Benefit Analysis Draw Lines in the Sand?
By Kenneth Anderson on December 31, 2009 5:09 pm in Cost-Benefit Analysis, Counter-Terrorism Policy, Terrorism, War on Terror
Many of us who write, read, and comment on this blog work frequently with cost-benefit analysis, perhaps typically through discipline specific tools, whether in economics or finance or business or engineering or other disciplines. In my case, in my day job I’m mostly an international business-finance professor who uses the typical, and really not very […]
Execution Even More than Design – Revisiting Richard Posner on Domestic Counterterrorism
By Kenneth Anderson on December 31, 2009 1:30 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, Terrorism, War on Terror
A difficult real world lesson for academics like me is that execution matters. It very often matters much more than institutional design. A suboptimal institutional design often matters less than how it is executed, and the attention with which it is executed. Hard for academics like me to keep in mind, because we are conceptually […]
Yemen, Somalia and ….
By Kenneth Anderson on December 30, 2009 8:20 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, International Law, Targeted Killing, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
Following up on Eric’s post re President Obama’s legal authority to target in Yemen … I’m a bit of a broken record on the need for the United States government to articulate a more coherent legal basis for its targeted killing. But it is just more so since the Christmas terrorist attack … the range […]
Early Music, Anyone?
To quote Roger North from the time of the English Civil War, when musicians, facing Puritan disapproval of music in the church and theatre, “chose to fidle at home, than to goe out and be knockt on the head abroad” … Follow-up to Orin’s post a few days ago asking about our readers’ music rotations […]
Greg Mankiw on Inflation and the “Surging Monetary Base”
Over at Greg Mankiw’s blog, a discussion of whether the “surging monetary base” necessarily means inflation down the road: Both reserves and T-bills are interest-paying obligations of the Federal government (including the Federal Reserve). They are essentially perfect substitutes. The monetary base, however, includes one of them but not the other, largely for historical reasons. The […]
Relentlessly Tactical, Event-Specific Catastrophism, and the Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis
By Kenneth Anderson on December 29, 2009 3:00 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, Terrorism, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
I’m traveling, so have not been able to comment as I’d like regarding the Christmas terror attack. However, I wanted to add one thought about cost benefit analysis and counter-terrorism. A couple of years ago I wrote a paper on ways in which the American political class is riven by deep foundational disagreements about the […]
Coffee
I am a late-comer to coffee – I grew up without it, and only began drinking it in the last five or six years. I started in earnest on sabbatical in Spain, with espresso, but soon realized that I preferred mightily the medium roast, slightly sweet, high altitude volcanic coffees of Guatemala, prepared either in […]