Newmark's Door

"Choco Pies offer North Koreans a taste of the other side"

Send Rodman back over with a couple of C-130's worth of MoonPies, and, apparently, the Norks would be putty in our hands.

The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes one more time

Megan McArdle: "How the IRS Wrecked Your Pension".

Work economics teachers need to do more of

Almost every week there is some new awful risk the media warn us of, awful because the sellers are "unregulated". Two examples;

"Wild, unregulated hacker currency bitcoin getting close to mainstream". (I'll admit "wild" is a nice touch.)

"Think Those Chemicals Have Been Tested?"

Unlike pharmaceuticals or pesticides, industrial chemicals do not have to be tested before they are put on the market. Under the law regulating chemicals, producers are only rarely required to provide the federal government with the information necessary to assess safety.

An answer--which needs to be taught more, and more forcefully--is nicely expressed in a column by George Mason economist Donald J. Boudreaux: "Competitive regulation".

The demand for government regulation springs from the lack of understanding that markets are amazingly proficient at regulating themselves through the competitive process. This process involves firms' competition for customers, workers, financing and suppliers.

See also Steven Greenhut's "Free Markets Are More Important Than Safety Regulations".

"The Minimum Wage Delusion, And The Death Of Common Sense"

Nice, short, non-technical summary of some of the important evidence.

Either a sign of the apocalypse or another (small) reason why capitalism is wonderful

You choose.

Poutine-flavored soda.

"Newegg nukes 'corporate troll' Alcatel in third patent appeal win this year"

Kmart, QVC, Lands' End, Intuit, Zappos, Sears, and Amazon all settled. Newegg and Overstock.com didn't and they won convincingly. 

"The true meaning of moral panics"

Interesting hypothesis. It needs a Ph.D. student in sociology in search of a thesis topic. (Link via Instapundit.)

But there’s actually something a bit more puzzling about the campus-rape panic. College campuses are far from a threatening environment for feminists. Nowadays women outnumber men in every department outside STEM fields. At many colleges mandatory ‘sensitivity training’ heavily privileges female and feminist perspectives. By federal encouragement, female students can now accuse men of rape and expect the claim to be evaluated under circumstances that deny the man any right to due process and the presumption of innocence.

On campus, the Other seems so thoroughly controlled that some academics now attribute declining male enrollments to an unwillingness to enter a hostile work environment. What are women like Meg Lanker-Simmons really pushing against? What in their environment do they not already own?

I think the answer is . . . themselves. The increasing intensity level of the campus-rape panic seems well correlated with the erosion of college womens’ position in sexual bargaining.

The new hotness in NYC K-12 education

Avenues: the World School. $43,000 per year. 

What does that money buy you? This, for instance:

Last winter, a group of Avenues 4-year-olds ventured out to the 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in Chelsea to view the work of John A. Parks, an English painter, who fingerpainted his childhood memories. Schulman thought it segued seamlessly with a unit they were doing on abstract art, which included studies of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Schulman, who always seems to be brimming with excitement, explained how the subject matter and the field trip were perfect for the immersion classes. “You can use the vocabulary in both languages,” she said, to learn about the art.

If I had a four-year-old who needed to know about Paul Klee, I guess I'd pay $43K a year, too.

"The Upper Class and Wealth Inequality in Sweden"

Tell me you would have guessed this. I wouldn't have.

Sweden is viewed as an egalitarian utopia by outsiders, but reality is complex. In some ways Sweden has less social equality than the United States. While the American upper class is largely meritocratic, the upper class in Sweden are still mostly defined by birth.

"Why Your Grandpa Is Cooler Than You"

Made me smile.

This is probably the point at which I should mention grandparents. Those in their 20s and 30s today have the experience of knowing and, usually, loving their grandparents for most or all of their adult lives. Today, college graduations, weddings, 30th birthday parties, Christenings, brises — these sorts of events are regularly blessed with multiple Grannies, Papas, Yiayias, Zaides, Nanas, Nonnas, Omas, Abuelitos. They stand up; they take bows. In the true fabric of experience, this is not some invisible stitching.

I am 40, and that’s how it has been for me. My mom might be 68 and still killing it wild-style at Zumba, but that is much less impressive to me than my grandfather, who was born in Dublin’s Jewish ghetto in 1908, became a union leader who saved hundreds of people from displaced-person camps after World War II, never met a plate of full-fat beef brisket he didn’t like and passed away with most of his marbles only last month, at nearly 105 years old.