Newmark's Door

If you're thinking about learning a new programming language, this may be useful.

Neal B. Freeman:

In Washington, and marbled throughout its pricy suburbs, there’s income inequality of a different sort. The richest counties in the country — Fairfax, Montgomery, Loudon, and the rest — are now clustered in the metro Washington area. They’re rich not because D.C. has just emerged as the Silicon Valley of the East or the North Dakota of the South. The D.C. region produces few new products, few new services, but it is rolling in boomtown money, nonetheless. Its faux prosperity is generated the old-fashioned way: by state coercion. The central government takes money from the folks “back home” and spreads it around the lobby culture, creating a fix-and-favor economy so prosperous that it outstrips all — literally, all — of the productive communities “back home.”

This situation can’t be politically hygienic.

"I, Pencil" reprised.

Nutella is a stirring example of globalization and spontaneous order in action.

Interesting argument. My guideline is that societies should be very careful when "fixing" long-established, widely-accepted institutions.

Yet another reason to get your sleep: lack of sleep may foster Alzheimer's.

In this piece Eric Nolte, an "airline captain for a major carrier,"  makes two fine points. Here's one:

When the waves closed over the watery graves of Kennedy, his wife, and sister-in-law, calls began to arise for greater regulation of private pilots. But there were already plenty of regulations on the books to cover every facet of Kennedy's last flight. As I asked my friends, how would the government restrain anybody from getting in their cars and driving off a cliff? How does one regulate common sense? And more to the point, what are the hazards of granting government the power to attempt such regulation of horse sense?

We live in an era when most people assume that every new problem is properly open to solution by government regulators. Implicit is the belief that the regulators have enough power, information, and wisdom to meet any new challenge.

Young Kennedy's pitiful death illustrates some of the issues that arise from the question of government regulation and the hugely vexing and misunderstood question of the major political tension of our age: the questions of the political primacy of the individual versus the state, and the very purpose of government.

Alexander K. Zentefis, a Ph.D., student at the U. of Chicago, recommends books for graduate study in economics. Useful for undergraduates thinking of going, beginning graduate students, maybe even faculty planning courses.

Also useful for those folks: John Cochrane's eight links to writing resources.

To quote what the psychiatrist, Dr. Krakower, chillingly tells Carmela Soprano: "One thing you can never say: You haven't been told."

(Transcript of part of the scene here; video clip here. One of the absolutely best scenes of the show.)

Related: You might think they'd know better by now. But noooooooo! "The Dangers of Pension Obligation Bonds". (With extra nice touch: this unanticipated problem is due to a fix to an earlier problem.)

Also related: "Chicago's Financial Fire: The city faces trouble from every direction."

Also related: the private sector, no surprise, is smarter.

The stunning improvement in business and family balance sheets is arguably the most impressive and under-reported characteristics of this U.S. recovery (see chart). The latest government statistics indicate that the private sector has massively deleveraged following the debt binge from 2000 to 2008.

Editorial, July 24, Chicago Tribune:

More bad news for Chicago (and Illinois) taxpayers arrived Friday morning in a 35-page, double-sided packet. On one of the last pages: "The entire Act is void."

. . .

The state is in a grotesque stalemate over its finances. Gov. Bruce Rauner, Senate President John Cullerton and House Speaker Michael Madigan can't agree on much of anything, let alone a pension strategy. Even a compromise offered by Cullerton and supported by Rauner that would give pensioned employees a choice on how to reduce their benefits doesn't appear likely to pass constitutional muster, given the courts' rulings. In this state, under these unambiguous decisions, you can't willingly negotiate away a constitutional right.

From a review of Nina Teicholz's The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Donald J. McNamara in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, July 2015:

This book should be read by every nutritional science professional as a guide to risks of hubris and the unquestioning belief in whatever the conventional wisdom of the day is and to the consequences of basing public policy on belief as opposed to evidence of positive, beneficial effects. All scientists should read it as an example of how limited science can become federal policy, which may, in in the long run, be harmful when the basic tenets of science, skepticism, and consistent questioning are set aside to appease the powerful voices convinced that we must do something (even if we do not have the proof that that something is the right something).

(Sorry, no link because the piece is behind a paywall.)