Newmark's Door

Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr. makes an important point. I hope the Republican nominee reads this and campaigns vigorously on it.

(I wouldn't make a case for any particular amount. But the point is qualitatively correct.)

Related: an academic paper by John W. Dawson and John J. Seater, "Federal Regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth".

We introduce a new time series measure of the extent of federal regulation in the U.S. and use it to investigate the relationship between federal regulation and macroeconomic performance. We find that regulation has statistically and economically significant effects on aggregate output and the factors that produce it – total factor productivity (TFP), physical capital, and labor. Regulation has caused substantial reductions in the growth rates of both output and TFP and has had effects on the trends in capital and labor that vary over time in both sign and magnitude. Regulation also affects deviations about the trends in output and its factors of production, and the effects differ across dependent variables. Regulation changes the way output is produced by changing the mix of inputs. Changes in regulation offer a straightforward explanation for the productivity slowdown of the 1970s. Qualitatively and quantitatively, our results agree with those obtained from cross-section and panel measures of regulation using cross-country data.

(Note that this could help explain our weak recovery, 2009-present.)

"Warning: San Francisco smells like a toilet".

"San Francisco is in a housing crisis, but we have no idea where to go from here".

Scientific paper in Cell Metabolism. More evidence in favor of beneficial effects from intermittent fasting.

Link via Instapundit.

From the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Alas, to paraphrase Jimmy Durante, they've got a million of 'em!

John Cochrane's very skeptical review of "behavioral economics".

UPDATE: Link fixed now. (Thanks Gorgasal and Michael.)

I hope Matt Ridley's life insurance is paid up because this piece will probably make some of the always-right-thinking, consensus-enshrining people very angry.

(But, if he's lucky, maybe they'll completely ignore it, as they sometimes do with careful, modest, well-reasoned arguments against their position.)

I'd agree with the commenter who wrote, "Matt, this must be the best summation of the sceptical position that I have ever read. Well done."

Link via Instapundit.

Troy Camplin makes an excellent point:

Every economist will tell you about the benefits from specialization. We have known about that since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. But for some reason, this knowledge is thrown out when it comes to specialization in academia. 

I am talking about the requirement for tenure-track professors to engage in research. 

The comments are highly entertaining. Some folks seem to think this is crazy, but it's clearly not.

My take is that good teaching and research are clearly complementary for some faculty, but are just as clearly not for others. It would be difficult to even estimate the proportions. 

But there's a very important fact Camplin doesn't discuss: good research is reasonably cheap to quantify: publications--even quality-adjusted--and citations can be counted. But good teaching is much more costly to assess and quantify. (Student evaluations, alas, are only a tiny bit better than nothing.)

Kevin D. Williamson still, yet again:

You have to credit the Left: Its strategy is deft. If you can make enough noise that sounds approximately like a moral crisis, then you can in effect create a moral crisis. Never mind that the underlying argument — “Something bad has happened to somebody else, and so you must give us something we want!” — is entirely specious; it is effective. In the wake of the financial crisis, we got all manner of “reform,” from student-lending practices to the mandates of Elizabeth Warren’s new pet bureaucracy, involving things that had nothing at all to do with the financial crisis. Democrats argued that decency compelled us to pass a tax increase in the wake of the crisis, though tax rates had nothing to do with it. A crisis is a crisis is a crisis, and if a meteor hits Ypsilanti tomorrow you can be sure that Debbie Stabenow will be calling for a $15 national minimum wage because of the plight of meteor victims.

Related: "Massacres and Magical Thinking".

I imagine this Quora discussion will get very, very long.

Not a joke, (Follow the link in the piece.)

I recommend enjoying skeptical commentary--while you still can:

James Lileks:

For example: the only reason Apple pulled the Civil War apps from the store was fear of the internet - specifically, fear of the worst part of the internet, where lack of reason is balanced by an excess of enthusiasm. No rational person would complain that there were Civil War sims. No sensible person would believe that society would be improved by demanding their removal. No emotionally stable person could think that they were safer now because someone, somewhere, would not get updates to a game they purchased that allowed them to fight as the Union Army but contained the sight of the Confederate flag. Anyone who would believe these things is tethered to reality by a frayed strand of dental floss, and while they may live in a comfy bubble where everyone believes the same things and has at least two friends who are doing very important work in the field of instructional graffiti, most people are stable enough to resist the siren call of the Stars and Bars, even in the form of a picture on a phone.

Ed Driscoll: "The phrase 'trigger warning' is now a trigger." (Also no joke.)

Jonah Goldberg:

Taken seriously, this new standard of anti-divisiveness would require cramming so many things down the memory hole it would be the functional equivalent of shoving a whole Thanksgiving turkey, uncooked, into the garbage disposal. Everywhere one looks, there are divisive things. The gay pride rainbow flag? Shvvvuuumph! Down the memory hole! Nazi memorabilia (still widely available at Amazon and Ebay)? Thwwwwwwwwwooosshh! Down the memory hole! Communist flags? Muslim Crescents? Christian Crucifixes? Stars of David (never mind Israeli flags)? Get ready for a long, grinding, thwarararammmmmfitang as the disciples of blackwhite thinking — and those who fear them — squeeze the polarizing bric-a-brac into the wheezing pneumatic tubery.