Author Archive | Tyler Cowen

In response to my “Was Oppenheimer Indeed a Communist?” post, historian Jerome Sternstein passed along the following: I noticed you called attention to the piece in the SF Chronicle about Oppenheimer. You might want your readers to see this link where they can parse the new, fascinating documents uncovered by Gregg Herken and mentioned in […]

That’s what James Taranto (Best of the Web) says, and it seems to me he’s right: “Former US first lady Hillary Clinton said the “stubborn” policies of President George W. Bush’s administration were endangering stability in the Middle East,” Agence France-Presse reports: The New York Democrat senator told the London-based Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat that […]

“Haiti doesn’t really have the choice of missing this new last chance.” That’s from James Foley, U.S. Ambassador to Haiti. Here is the New York Times article. As an aside, I am struck by how words such as “really” and “essentially” alter or reflect the true meaning of sentences. They are almost words of negation. […]

The ever-insightful Randall Parker has much to say about these issues. First, by 2040 China will have a higher proportion of elderly than will the United States. This will create fiscal problems, but on the bright side such a China is unlikely to be militarily aggressive. Yet there will be other problems: “In 1993 and […]

Diego Gambetta is one of my favorite social scientists. His writings on the Mafia and on trust are classics. I offer you a recent article by him on rationality and terrorism. Most importantly, he addresses the question of will this happen again. Here is one money quote: “9/11 is a wild outlier among terrorist acts […]

Read the ever-insightful Randall Parker. The answer of course is no. Here is just one bit: “Hey, if it is standard practice for the Saudis to lower prices before US Presidential elections then maybe we should amend the constitution to reelect presidents yearly. Think of all the money we’d save. Given that the price of […]

That is the title of a book manuscript by my colleague Richard Ippolito. I’ve yet to read it, but I feel confident recommending its treatment of microeconomics. Thanks to Newmark’s Door for the pointer.

Co-blogger David (immediately below) raises the question of why bloggers don’t get many review copies of books. In part some publishing houses may think of blogs and the Internet as threats, rightly or wrongly. They prefer not to think about us, and they prefer not to have to tell their bosses: “These are interesting outlets, […]

I’ve been waiting for researchers to do MRI scans on people when they vote or look at political ads. The New York Times reports on precisely this latter experiment: “The researchers had already zeroed in on those [9-11 and war] images and their effect among Democrats on the part of the brain that responds to […]

I don’t usually blog on Iraq, if only because I have never been there. Nor do I have any Arabic at all. But lately there has been so much talk about how the war is going. Jacob (below) writes about who has and hasn’t changed their minds. Perhaps an outsider’s perspective on the whole matter […]

A bunch of us were sitting around, trying to figure out what is The Economist’s Vice. Here was one good candidate: The Economist’s Vice: “To think that Wealth Maximization is a good proxy for Utility Maximization” I nominated the following: The Economist’s Vice: “To think that it is scientific to talk of “satisfying preferences,” and […]

“A top Russian ballerina, who was sacked for being too heavy, lost a damages claim for £575,000 against the chief of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre yesterday. The prima ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, who was fired in September for being too bulky to be lifted by her dancing partners, sought the damages from the Bolshoi’s general director, Anatoly […]

Randall Parker offers some interesting facts about the finances of Iraqi reconstruction. Here is one good bit: “Even though involvement in Iraq is costing US taxpayers a lot of money at this point very little of the reconstruction money from the US government has been spent. Efforts to repair war damage and kick-start the economy, […]

In my law and film class this year we watched four movies: High Noon, Kubrick’s early Paths of Glory, Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, a Canadian movie from 1997. A schoolbus crashes through the ice and many schoolchildren drown, leading to a liability suit in a small town. To my surprise, this […]

I’m hardly one to espouse a naive (or sophisticated) self-interested view of political action. That being said, I chuckled when I read the following: ” Last year’s tax cut proved to be a significant windfall for its main architect and political instigator, saving President Bush tens of thousands of dollars on his 2003 return.” Bush’s […]