Below is a report I just recieved from my friend, Junjiang Gao. I thought it needed to be passed on to the curious.
“There was a news report about a religious activity held in a Taiwanese city. The picture went along with the article showed a stage with a couple of female pole dancers. The [...]
John Whitehead at Environmental Economics offers some links to extra information about the size of an efficient gas tax, and scolds me and everyone else who defends CAFE on practical grounds:
“I’ve read several places, not at Vox Baby, the excuse that since gas taxes are politically infeasible and CAFE standards are feasible then we should [...]
Reading through Brad DeLong’s weblog today, I noticed a link to Vox Baby (a post titled “Don’t Linger in this CAFE”, showing once and for all that it’s not just me who cannot resist a cheap play on words), wherein Andrew Samwick says most of the same things I said in my previous post. [...]
The Bush administration’s proposed revisions of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards have been met with rather vocal scorn, and rightly so. Michael Giberson’s criticism is particularly interesting; he raises some good points, but it’s worth a critical analysis, as useful information can be teased out of the process.
He argues:
“Of course, American consumers [...]
A black essayist writes in this week’s Time magazine about falling out of love with hip-hop and in love with White Music. His journey is a thought-provoking commentary on the influence of race and other social pressures over what reaches our ears. There is universality in his tale of moving from Public Enemy to Bjork–fears [...]
After writing that last, slightly vitriolic post regarding a certain breed of leftist, I’ve been thinking about how difficult it can be to critique even the worst arguments of that type, as they’re completely lexical in nature and are typically very good at avoiding the use of concrete definitions. Such loose definitions allow the [...]
Tim Haab at Environmental Economics asked for help understanding an article entitled “Privatization is the Real Tragedy of the Commons”, by “Robert Ovetz, PhD”. As a smart guy who is inimately familiar with nonsense of this sort, I’d like to offer my assistance. Robert Ovetz, PhD begins with a explanation of the theory [...]
I once commented to a friend, “If you have to say ‘I am entitled to my opinion’… you’re not.” In a similar, but more verbose vein, we have Plato:
“Now I observe that when we are met together in the assembly, and the matter in hand relates to building, the builders are summoned as advisers; [...]
If we consider progress to be an improvement in traditional measures of human welfare-life expectancy, leisure time, and the goods and services available for consumption, a definite pattern can be seen over time: the long march of human history has yielded both progress and an increase in the rate at which progress has occurred. [...]
Employers view extended periods of unemployment as a negative. So for workers who cannot find a suitable job within the first few months of unemployment, their chances of finding suitable employment begins to decrease with time. As their odds decrease, the average time before they find a suitable job increases (by definition). [...]