« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »
Thomas Sowell, bravely outspoken as always:
Slavery also cannot explain the difference between American blacks and West Indian blacks living in the United States because the ancestors of both were enslaved. When race, racism, and slavery all fail the empirical test, what is left?
Culture is left.
(Wall Street Journal, may require subscription.)
In management education, accounting, economics, and finance are old and busted. The new hotness? Management as coaching basketball. ("Five fingers, one fist": not just for jocks anymore.)
Two very interesting economics-related posts at Coyote Blog: "60 Second Refutation of Socialism, While Sitting at the Beach" and "Economics of NFL Draft" (which summarizes a paper by Cade Massey and Richard H. Thaler, "The Loser's Curse: Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the National Football League Draft").
Henry Copeland of Blogads has a funny and interesting post, "Business Week's cover: the kiss of death".
Ralph Peters: "Iraq may prove to be the defeat that destroyed the allure of terrorism for hundreds of millions of discontented Muslims. Terrorists won't disappear, but the spotlight of Iraq has revealed them as savage, indiscriminate, blasphemous and, worst of all, incapable."
Sometmes an academic critic can be a little too creative. Here is David Yaffe reviewing Chistopher Ricks's Dylan's Visions of Sin:
The section on Dylan's 1983 song "Blind Willie McTell" is as revealing an example as any of how Ricks can get lost in the minutiae of dictionaries and literary and biblical concordances while losing track of what the song is actually about. He discusses William Tell's arrow (since the first line of the song contains the word "arrow"), makes many references to the Psalms (not a bad hunch, since Dylan was still on the tail end of his fire and brimstone mode) and many asides to let you know that the Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University and this year's choice for Oxford Professor of Poetry is aware of Homer's and Milton's blindness. "William Tell's arrow hit the apple on the head of the apple of his eye, his son. Since Mc means 'son of,' the son of William Tell may be living in another country under another name: William, or Willie, McTell."
Over twenty pages of precious wordplay and meta-Dylan references (to "Gotta Serve Somebody"), Ricks does not even mention that Dylan was not merely summoning up William Tell or adding the "Mc" for any fancy reason, but that McTell was an actual blues musician and the song's true subject. Blind Willie McTell was not blind because of Milton but because he was blind from birth. And the McTell of the song was so named not because of William Tell but, according to legend, because a teacher at a school for the blind had mistakenly changed it from "McTear." Music and history don't exist for Ricks's own metaphorical convenience
Jeffrey A. Miron's lecture outlines for his course at Harvard, "A Libertarian Perspective on Economic and Social Policy."
Peter Gordon of USC has a short but powerful post on "the foremost social and economic problem of our time."
Andrew Gelman at Columbia argues that, Axelrod nothwithstanding, trench warfare in World War I was not a Prisoner's Dilemma.
In case you think you've heard it all: "Exploding Toads Baffle Experts."