Another prime example of the sort of talking point I find grating not so much because it’s specious as because it’s so shamelessly, disingenuously specious: So here’s a little test for our Republican friends to help them decide the status of the nation’s economy. I dare them to answer these questions truthfully, as Americans first, […]

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Sometimes I swear the Times runs articles just to make my head hurt. Consider this op-ed by one Robert X. Cringely, who does actually appear to be a fictional character dreamt up by Arthur Sulzburger (or other, darker forces) to be the instrument of my torment: Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, […]

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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 Health > Total fertility rate 1 1 Education > Average years of schooling of adults 12 26 People > […]

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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 […]

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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 — […]

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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 […]

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And

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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