Author Archive | Todd Zywicki

I had the opportunity recently to visit the renovated National Archives here in DC which recently reopened. In addition to the hall with the great documents, the Archives now has a terrific permanenent exhibit featuring the “National Archives Experience.” The idea is that the archives aren’t just the old documents, but rather is a trove […]

“I got a FE-ver, and the only prescription . . . is more cowbell!” Blue Oyster Cult was in town last night (I did not attend, I went to a disappointing Jane Monheit performance at the Kennedy Center instead) and there is a hilarious article in today’s Washington Post about the great Saturday Night Live […]

A few days ago I commented on a very thoughtful article by a Dartmouth student commenting on the lack of intellectual diversity at Dartmouth and his view of the negative effect that has on his educational experience. I have received several interesting follow-up emails from current students and recent grads making similar observations (although a […]

I was forwarded a remarkable column written by Dan Knecht, a senior at my alma mater Dartmouth and a columnist for The Dartmouth, the traditional campus newspaper. Entitled “The Monolith on the Hill,” Knecht observes: In my almost four years at Dartmouth, I have encountered more than a handful of dyed-in-the-wool liberals. I have yet […]

This month’s issue of the journal Regulation, also contains another article by yours trule (co-authored with Jerry Ellig and Asheesh Agarwal) on the policy considerations involved in the Supreme Court cases involving the direct shipment of wine. The article draws on empirical and other evidence to describe the benefits to consumers from direct wine shipment […]

will be forthcoming in the Green Bag. Co-authored by myself and my former colleague Asheesh Agarwal, “The Original Meaning of the 21st Amendment.” For those who just can’t wait, you can get it online at the Green Bag website. This is a shorter and more formal article version of some of the points I made […]

I thought readers might be interested in some correspondence that has followed up on my earlier post on Project Implicit. One person wrote (edited): Perhaps your knee-jerk reaction was not to the Implicit Association Test but to the possibility that you are not always consciously in control of your beliefs and behaviors. If that is […]

I was born in Pittsburgh and I am a lifelong Steelers fan. Now my wife thinks I’m insane, just because I’ve started calling my two dogs “Bus” and “Duce.” My older, larger yellow laborador retriever is the Bus (Jerome Bettis), of course, because his size and because he is yellow like a school bus. My […]

A lot of stupid academic research goes on every day. Today’s Washington Post magazine features one of the dumbest I have come across in some time–Project Implicit. According to the Project Implicit website its purpose is as follows: It is well known that people don’t always ‘speak their minds’, and it is suspected that people […]

Did anyone else notice this quote on law.com (the headline is in the little box to the right of this post, “Handicapping Bush’s Judicial Nominations”): There’s no shortage of overcooked rhetoric in judicial nominations battles. When asked whom he opposes the most among the 12 renominated candidates, a staffer for a Democratic member of the […]

“The distribution of natural endowments for math abilities for men show the same mean but greater variance than math abilities for women. Therefore, men will be disproportionately represented at the tails of the distribution relative to women. In other words, there are likely to be more men in society than women with unusually poor and […]

One of the questions for Lawrence Summers now apparently is why only 4 of 32 tenure-track offers in recent years have gone to women. A seemingly obvious question–I wonder how many offers were made to conservatives/libertarians/Republicans during that same period? If Dan Klein’s data on other elite universities is accurate for Harvard (and there is […]

Because of my recent research on Obesity and Advertising Policy, I have inadvertently stumbled into the periphery of the constitutional regulation of commercial speech. After grazing a little bit in that literature, I was struck by the remarkable shallowness in that literature about the economic analysis of advertising. So out of curiosity, I ran a […]

Interesting take by Tony Dungy on Randy Moss’s “celebration” yesterday. I had never heard of this particular tradition before.

An interesting comment I received on my hybrid cars post struck me as something to think about. Economists generally advocate the use of tolls and toll lanes to reduce traffic congestion, as opposed to HOV requirements. Often these toll lanes are criticized under the sobriquet of so-called “Lexus Lanes” and it is said to be […]