"The Female Happiness Paradox"

First sentence of the abstract of a seemingly ungated NBER working paper:

Using data across countries and over time we show that women are unhappier than men in unhappiness and negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used – anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger – and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep.

Link via Instapundit who quips, "Obviously we're not feminisming hard enough."


"Chicago: A City in Freefall"

This is nicely put by John Di Leo:

In nearly every other arena of life, we see people and organizations in a competitive environment rise to the challenge.  When a sports team gets better, its rivals do, too.  They have to.  When a restaurant or department store becomes more popular, its competitors across the street or across the mall quickly up their game as well, offering better value, better service, better quality, better ambiance — whatever it takes to win back the customers they’ve lost.

Only in politics do we see this apparent disinterest in results.  Only in the sphere of state and local governments do we see politicians uninterested in the decline of their cities, the indigence of their population, the loss of opportunities for the generations to come.


"20 Years to Disaster"

"The United States has about 20 years for corrective action after which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt."

Related:

There's No Easy Way Out of This Debt Spiral.

What it would cost to stabilize the soaring national debt.

Underlying US Budget Gap Doubled in Latest Year. (Shows the sources of this increase.)

The Real Scandal in Washington Is the Government's Reckless Spending.


"Weekly Market Pulse: Dark Matter"

Joseph Calhoun of Alhambra Investments tacitly supports Milton Friedman:

I am constantly amazed that economists who consider themselves staunch capitalists, believe that, given sufficient information, they could do what they firmly believe socialists and communists cannot. Namely, to shape the economy through policy, fiscal and/or monetary, to produce a better outcome than the market left to its own devices. 


"Technology, Innovation, and War"

Short interview with Edward Luttwak who sharply criticizes government regulation of our defense industry:

The American R&D system is governed by 5,000-plus rules designed to avoid waste, fraud, and mismanagement. Unfortunately, these rules make everything terrifically elaborate and costly, and they also seemingly make it impossible to do anything in less than 20 years’ time. When you do things slowly in the R&D world, it means that components and elements like microprocessors become obsolete while you’re still working on a system. Then you have to go back and bring all those obsolete systems up to date. This is how we end up taking years and years—decades, in fact—to develop new weapons, at a huge cost.