Conor Friedersdorf finds serial plagiarist Ben Domenech stroking his chin over the pernicious collapse of values that’s causing moderns to delay marriage and reproduction. But sometimes, two charts are worth a thousand words of wankery.

8

[...]

[Read more →]

Tyler Cowen wonders:
Should the service fee by high or low?  It could cut either way.  A low service fee encourages withdrawals and thus gambling, which is profitable for the casino.  A high service fee takes in money from the desperate and those with high time preference.
It was $4.99.  (Of course that is n = 1.)
On [...]

[Read more →]

Your daily emetic:  Try to make it through this load of pap–a “manifesto” for “Generation M”—without bringing your lunch back up. A tiny sample:
Dear Old People Who Run the World,
My generation would like to break up with you.
Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we [...]

[Read more →]

Richard Posner is catching flak for his suggestion that copyright law be expanded to cover paraphrase in order to save journalism from fierce digital competition. Thing is, that’s arguably the current state of the law. There’s a little known “hot news” doctrine that dates from the early 20th century and gives news agencies a very [...]

[Read more →]

And

[Read more →]

Justin Fox (via Ezra) calls for dumber regulation:
The argument goes like this: the biggest flaw in current financial regulation is not that there is too little of it or too much, but that it relies on regulators knowing best.   [...] You can spin this into a case for reduced regulation–regulators are likely to mess up, [...]

[Read more →]

An interesting point from Ezra, summarizing Brad Plumer:
Brad Plumer has a very nice post on why the Congressional Budget Office has, historically, predicted that pollution regulations would cost much more than they actually did. When Congress went to create a cap-and-trade plan for sulfur dioxide in the early ’90s, the CBO figured that permits would [...]

[Read more →]

Ezra on financial regulation:
Word is that Congress won’t really begin considering these reforms until the end of summer or the beginning of fall. That means they’re not likely to come to the floor until the end of the year or quite near it. That means banks and other affected companies will have months to organize [...]

[Read more →]

Via the magic of an alert for inbound links, I find an artblogger riffing on a recent post here who, oddly enough, brings up that old game theory classic the Snowdrift Game:
The situation of the Snowdrift game involves two drivers who are trapped on opposite sides of a snowdrift. Each has the option of staying [...]

[Read more →]

James Boyce at HufflePuff:
No one is dumber than a Newspaper Executive.
Back in the day at Duke, I was an econ major, much to the amusement of many of my friends now. I learned a little something called “supply and demand.”
Let me use small words.
If someone really wants what you’re selling, you can raise prices.
If someone [...]

[Read more →]