So it’s December 1991. I’m 27 years old, and working as a reporter in the Montgomery bureau of The Birmingham News. One Monday morning, I pick up a New York Times—I think from the rack on South Decatur Street a couple blocks from my apartment. There’s a story in it about the new executive producer of the Today show, this prematurely …
Sorry, forgot for a couple of days there that I’m a magazine columnist. Here’s what I wrote for the current issue.
In a cryptic little response to my post last week on Chicago economics, the estimable Reiham Salam writes:
Justin Fox doesn’t mention Frank Knight or Jacob Viner in this post. He also suggests that John Cochrane has nothing interesting to say.
This hit a nerve. I did consider discussing the pre-1950s Chicago economics tradition …
The WSJ reports that the Treasury Department is making its biggest offering of inflation linked bonds in five years today:
In a bid to meet the demands of big creditors such as China and Japan and keep its funding costs low, the Treasury will kickstart this year’s offerings of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities by selling $10
…
I’ve read through that headline-grabbing AP report on the impact of stimulus-funded road and bridge spending on employment about five times, and I’m still not entirely clear what the AP’s reporters discovered. But I think it’s this: That there was no correlation between the movement of county unemployment rates and the presence or …
This was linked to in the comments Friday, and it made me laugh:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwZk6p31nlo]
In my post Thursday on the failure to connect the dots pointing to the underpants bomber (can dots point?), I declared without offering any evidence that:
Any halfway affluent individual can assemble a better set of communication devices and networks on her own than she’d ever get from the IT department of a large corporation (or large
…
The long-awaited end of the Great American Job Destruction of 2008 and 2009 did not arrive in December, as some forecasters hoped it might, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported another 85,000-job decline in nonfarm payroll employment this morning. The BLS did revise November’s payroll number, initially estimated at -11,000, up to …
I’ve already shared Sam Savage’s take on the failure to keep the underpants bomber from getting on that plane to Detroit: that it’s just really really really hard to identify a vanishingly small segment of the population and keep them off airplanes without mistakenly preventing scads of harmless people from boarding. But there are other …
Dennis Santiago of Institutional Risk Analytics reports that in the first seven days of the joint IRA/Huffington Post/Roosevelt Institute Move Your Money campaign, about 340,000 people searched 16,631 zip codes to find community banks in their neighborhoods that are rated healthy by IRA. Well, maybe not 340,000 people—340,000 searches. …
Like me, Jonathan Chait also liked parts of Jim Manzi’s epic right-leaning prescription for combining competitiveness with social equity. But Chait also identifies a major problem with a pillar of Manzi’s argument—that the U.S. has dramatically outperformed Western Europe economically since the dawn of the Reagan era:
[S]ince 1980, the
…
Whoops, sorry. I got so caught up in a must-write-column trance today that I forgot to blog. I did briefly consider saying something about John Cassidy’s edifying and entertaining New Yorker piece on Chicago School economics, which I read while eating breakfast and making Curious Capitalist Jr.’s lunch this morning. But when I looked it …