George Mason University economist and blogger Bryan Caplan has a new book out called The Myth of the Rational Voter. I haven’t actually seen a copy yet, but I have read about it.

This news is making myself kick myself even harder than I usually do, because I have a long-delayed book due out a year from now called The Myth of the …

A commenter on Brad DeLong’s blog has a few questions for me, apropos of the snide opening line of a post I wrote a couple days ago:

Economist Brad DeLong, as part of his long-running campaign to persuade the world that journalists are flawed (and many are; unlike academic economists, who are right about everything and also smell great!)

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Since most of the commenters to this blog (including my Dad) are left-wing extremists, I figured I’d better immediately share this view from the other end of the political spectrum that just landed in my email inbox:

Dear Dubious Capitalist:
I just wanted to tell you that for a professional writer, your smarmy, trying

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On the train ride back from Washington Tuesday night, I did some of the reading that Brad DeLong assigned me after my first attempt at writing about neoconservatism. The first thing I got out of Irving Kristol’s Fall 1995 Public Interest article on “American conservatism 1945-1965” was that Brad was overdoing it when he said it was …

Yesterday afternoon, Karen Tumulty over at Swampland e-mailed to ask if I had anything to say about Toyota passing GM in global sales in the first quarter of 2007. I tried but I really couldn’t. Anybody who reads the business press has known for a couple of years that this was about to happen. Also, everybody in the auto business had …

Says Wal-Mart boss Lee Scott: “Our goal should be for every man, woman and child in this country to have health insurance. The $2 trillion question, literally, is how do we get there?” You can get his whole speech here, so no point in running more quotes from it.

Scott also announced here at the World Health Care Congress that Wal-Mart …

Now I’m listening to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden do a Q&A here at the World Health Care Congress in D.C. “The employer-based health system is melting like a popsicle on a summer sidewalk,” he says.

Wyden unveiled his plan for universal health insurance in December, and he feels like the wind is at his back. In 1993, he says, the view in the …

I just got finished moderating a panel at the World Healthcare Congress in Washington, featuring Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, GE Healthcare CEO Joe Hogan, and futurist/consultant/Scotsman Ian Morrison. A major conclusion was that we should all be more like Australians (Liveris is a native of Darwin; Morrison has spent a lot of time …

Despite the best efforts of the Financial Times and just about everybody who works at the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz is still in charge of the global lending (and ostensibly poverty-fighting) institution. He’s also hired Bob Bennett (Bill Clinton’s lawyer back in the day) to joust on his behalf and has promised, in the helpful words of …

Swampland emigrant Tom T (I love it that so far I’m only getting the cogent and nonabusive Swamplanders) wants to know, in a comment to my post about politicians’ ties to Wall Street:

[W]hy is it that these “entanglements” are only a problem when the one entangled is a Democrat? Why didn’t we hear more about Bush’s entanglement with oil

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