Newmark's Door

A concise summary for your reference.

Fine piece by economist Tim Harford. If I were still teaching MBAs I'd assign it to them. Has several interesting nuggets including these three:

Now there are 60-odd million in the world, nearly one for every 100 people - not bad for a humble bookcase. . . . 

Every three seconds, another Billy bookcase rolls off the production line of the Gyllensvaans Mobler factory in Kattilstorp, a tiny village in southern Sweden. . . .

It does not look like it has changed much since 1978, yet it costs 30% less. That is partly due to constant, tiny tweaks in both product and production method.

UPDATE: Link included now.

I'd guess that the Liberals are even more scared than the muggers are.

An excellent question followed by a balanced and reasonable discussion.

A Lambo, a '56 Silver Cloud, and four others.

Two weeks ago it was North Carolina. Here's Wisconsin. Could this be a trend? Turn loose the graduate students needing thesis topics!

Related: "Gov. Scott Walker invokes ‘Reform Dividend’ in ambitious spending plan".

Boy, do I ever agree with this. Why should anybody believe anonymous sources? Particularly since nowadays the anonymous quote is often accompanied by some dopey line like "The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly". Gee, that earns my trust!

George Will: "America's pension crisis is really coming".

(Part 1, about California's pensions, was on this blog recently here.)

"Mapping the college curriculum across 1M+ syllabi." With filtering for field, institution, state, and country.

"Adjectival Reinforcement Therapy" supposedly cures a wide variety of behavioral problems.

Color me extremely skeptical. Especially since my brief Net search didn't turn up any substantial support.