In this diavlog with Glenn Loury the behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan recounts the results of an experiment. - If given the option of paying $100 for an item vs. $80 for an item, but in the second case having to...
Icelanders reject deal to repay British and Dutch: The outcome of the referendum had not been in doubt since Iceland had recently been offered better repayment terms than those contained in the deal on which residents were voting. Partial referendum...
And more productive. FiveThirtyEight has a nice meme-buster post, US Manufacturing Is Not Dead. This was known to me, but Tom Schaller has all the charts put together nice. Here's industrial output: The labor force engaged in producing durable goods:...
By now, you probably know that there is a specter haunting Europe, and that specter is Argentina. Greece's debt crisis is putting the spotlight on the PIIGS nations of the Eurozone, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. One thing to...
I got the following chart from Wikipedia, and it suggests that on a per capita inflation-adjusted basis we're spending more on defense today than we were during the Reagan build-up, or Vietnam! Is this for real?...
Two interesting graphs from Calculated Risk. The first shows that the changes in GDP seem during the last recessive are on a par with those of the early 1980s and before (though we don't know if we're in a U...
Jobless Turn to Family for Help, Often With Complications: More than half of the respondents to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll of 708 unemployed adults nationwide said they had borrowed money from friends or relatives. In most cases,...
Mike the Mad Biologist points me to an interesting article in Wired, Uranium Is So Last Century -- Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke. Of course Wired is a booster of many things which never take off, but in general...
Another idea, Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left: The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking...
No Longer Their Golden Ticket: In fact, "The Deep End" was conceived in 2007, that halcyon era of $160,000 starting salaries and full employment even for law grads who had scored in the 150s on their LSAT's. Those days are...
