Newmark's Door

Doonesbury puts in a good word for economics instruction. 

The message, as always--always, always--is be real darn careful with your money.

UPDATE: link is now fixed. 

The $2.4 billion apiece Virginia class nuclear submarines. 

Eight-minute video by AEI president Arthur Brooks. (Send the link to your Liberal friends! Or, more importantly, to those undecided swing voters.)

Personally, I think moral cases for free enterprise are nice but unnecessary. I think the material propserity and personal freedom engendered by free enterprise is more than sufficient.

"From the time of Pericles until the end of the 18th century in London—2,300 years," notes Harvard Prof. Lawrence Summers, "standards of living on Earth increased perhaps 100%." In the U.S. since 1790, by contrast, real per capita gross domestic product has increased nearly 4,000%. Quality of life, in other words, increased 40 times more in 220 years of American history than it had globally over two millennia. In 2012, a typical American in the bottom fifth of the income distribution has a far higher quality of life—and life expectancy—than the average member of the top 1% in 1790.

But as they say, there are many roads to nirvana. If a moral case converts some people, I'm all for it.

". . . home of the National Radiation Map, depicting environmental radiation levels across the USA, updated in real time every minute.  This is the first web site where the average citizen (or anyone in the world) can see what radiation levels are anywhere in the USA at any time."

XO Sauce--"the caviar of the East"--is the new hotness. (For nearly $65/pound it had better be.)

According to New York. Robert Downey Jr. and Will Smith head the list. George Clooney is only tenth. 

A Lifehacker poll ranks Allrecipes.com first. 

Nick Rowe entreats economists to remember "Friedman's thermostat".

And it really bugs me that people who know a lot more econometrics than I do think that you can get around the problem this way, when you can't. And it bugs me even more that econometricians spend their time doing loads of really fancy stuff that I can't understand when so many of them don't seem to understand Milton Friedman's thermostat. Which they really need to understand.

It sounds like "Beware reduced forms" to me, but it's so energetic and well-written it's more fun.