Author Archive | Tyler Cowen

First is Advil, here is the longer list, follow the links for a discussion of caveats and qualifications. My intuitive response to the data is that people shoplift when they are desperate, or feeling some kind of pain or depression, rather than calculating cost and benefit in a rational Beckerian fashion.

Bloggers often prize their anonymity. That’s the case at EffectMeasure.com, a blog started in November that deals with bird flu and other diseases. A blogger identified as Revere says the site was started by a group of well-known “senior public health scientists.” Revere declined to identify the group’s members. “The site is often critical of […]

Some of you may know that I have my hand in a new blog on Avian Flu. The purposes of the blog is to provide a clearinghouse for information on avian flu and its public policy implications. The very latest news concerns a forthcoming WHO report that human-to-human transmission may well be occurring in Vietnam, […]

I am pleased to recommend the new book — Economics for Lawyers — by my colleague Richard Ippolito. Are you looking for a work that will explain the concepts of moral hazard, adverse selection, the Coase Theorem, externalities, and other widely used concepts? This is the place to go. The very careful 415 pages of […]

I have no expertise in the legal issues here, but I was struck by a recent case in Wheat Ridge Colorado. A seventh grade teacher took out “under God” from the pledge and replaced it with “One nation, under your belief system…”. This doesn’t make sense even for extreme relativists. The teacher claimed to have […]

Brad DeLong explains why life will never be dull. Here is just one bit: As long as I think of these as “texts,” they are dry and boring. But there is a key to making them exciting: to remember that they are not texts: they are people–people urgently trying to talk to me, to tell […]

Bobby Fischer, who was being held in a Japanese prison for violating the trade embargo against the former Yugoslavia, will now be receiving an Icelandic passport. The Icelandic Parliament had debated the matter for weeks; they did not grant Fischer’s request for citizenship but did decide in favor of travel documents. Iceland, of course, had […]

His supporters filed a petition that Fischer might be released from detention in a Tokyo jail and allowed to travel to Iceland, where he has been granted refuge. But Japanese Justice Ministry lawyers said they were not prepared to change Fischer’s deportation destination to Iceland, and that he would have to remain in detention. A […]

As many VC readers may know, the Brazilian government has started fingerprinting American visitors, as a kind of retaliation for how we now treat Brazilian visitors. My friend and colleague David Levy just flew to Brazil, and he offers the following account of the process: “The Brazilian authorities are indeed engaged in “tit-for-tat” for US […]

In an appearance before Congress in February, when the controversy over Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl moment was at its height, Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell laid some startling statistics on U.S. senators. The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up […]

CNN.com offers one summary. The key plank is to give illegal workers a three or possibly six-year temporary visa if they step forward with an [illegal] job in hand. When the temporary visa expires, then they have to leave the country. In the meantime they could apply for a greencard, although they would not receive […]

The Rock of Gibraltar was the most interesting locale of my recent honeymoon. Typically we think of Anglo-American culture as penetrating the rest of the world, but in this case the positions are reversed. 30,000 nervous Gibraltarians are surrounded by 40 million Spaniards. Morocco is on the other side. Gibraltar is currently a territory of […]

To me the big puzzle remains why Al Qaeda has not pulled off another successful attack on American soil. Look at the two snipers, they almost brought the Washington area to a standstill, and neither was close to an organizational genius. Over the last two weeks we have instead seen terrorist “chatter” leading to foiled […]

I am doing some research on the music market, and was wondering if any VC readers knew of any data on the total number of music releases worldwide. The RIAA, of course, puts out such data for the United States. Comparative data over time would be especially useful, as would be any other quantitative measures […]

I am hearing from some readers that contrary to my previous report, the supposed new Tribe blog is in fact a fraud and not by Tribe. A credible source confirms that Tribe knows nothing about the blog. My apologies to Tribe and to VC readers.