While I was in Madison, Wisconsin, last week, I paid a visit to one of my favorite econobloggers: UW professor of public affairs and economics Menzie Chinn. I took this photo, which I hope will be the first in an acclaimed and award-winning series on econobloggers at work. Although if you look closely, you’ll see [...]

My new column is online and the issue of Time with a California fire fighter on the cover. It begins: When times are good, it’s awfully hard to tell the knuckleheads from the geniuses in the financial-services business. That’s because bad loans and bad investments tend to look just as profitable as good ones–and sometimes [...]

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has a provocative article in City Journal (the Manhattan Institute’s publication; that’s two MI references in two blog posts. Crazy!) making the case that state and federal politicians should stop spending money trying to resurrect Buffalo (via his Harvard colleague Greg Mankiw): Scores of close to worthless urban projects have received [...]

The conservative Manhattan Institute got lots of press a couple of months ago for its study of school naming practices, which discovered that ever fewer schools are being named after people. This trend, the Manhattanites wrote, “raises questions about the civic mission of public education and the role that school names may play in that [...]

I turned on the TV when I got back to my hotel Tuesday night and somehow ended up on the Golf Channel. They were offering news coverage of the Southern California fires, but purely in terms of which golf courses were affected. Of particular interest was Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego, which will [...]

When I saw this sign at a McDonald’s here in Madison I had to take a picture. Why? Because of its potential international-relations consequences. Back in 1996, Tom Friedman proposed his famous Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention in the New York Times: [W]hen a country reaches a certain level of economic development, when it [...]

Back when it became clear early this year that subprime mortgage lending had become a big mess, I sort of figured that the practices that had led to the mess would disappear pretty quickly. That’s the way financial markets work: They can go wildly overboard in one direction or another, but when it comes time [...]

I took a photo of the first class I spoke to here in Madison, so when I arrived in Bob Drechsel‘s intermediate reporting class this afternoon the students asked if I was going to take their picture. So as an illustration of, I dunno, the self-indulgence inherent in blogging (or at least my blogging), I’ve [...]

And it’s really cold. At least it is if you’re riding a bike along Lake Mendota before 9 a.m. with no hat and no gloves.