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Legal conservatives would do better to hold fast to the principles that have served them well, to safeguard that which it has been their special duty to defend. They would do better to insist on the rule of the dead.
I wouldn't sell short the possibility of technical breakthroughs. But I wouldn't count on them either.
Page has the national debt clock which is discouraging and I'd seen before. But it also has--and I don't remember seeing before--U.S. state debt clocks. And I found out after a minute or two quick scan that North Carolina has the third lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the country, 7.18%. Not bad! (The champion is currently Wyoming, 5.6%, and the runner-up is Idaho, 6.22%.)
Paper coauthored by distinguished economist Peter Leeson. It's gated but here's the abstract:
Negative infectious disease externalities are less prevalent in the absence of government intervention and less costly to society than is often supposed. That is so for three reasons. (1) Unlike externality-creating behaviors in many classical externality contexts, such behaviors are often self-limiting in the context of infectious disease. (2) In market economies, behaviors that may create infectious disease externalities typically occur at sites that are owned privately and visited voluntarily. Owners have powerful incentives to regulate such behaviors at their sites, and visitors face residual infection risk contractually. (3) The social cost of infectious disease externalities is limited by the cheapest method of avoiding externalized infection risk. That cost is modest compared to the one usually imagined: the value of life (or health) lost to the disease if government does not intervene. We elaborate these arguments in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Ruminations on the future of AI". (Link via Marginal Revolution.)
Russell Roberts on the economic subfield known as "public choice". If I become king of America I would consider making a semester course of public choice required for all high school seniors.
Noted scientist and Great Barrington Declaration coauthor Jay Bhattacharya laments what Stanford has become.
Maxim Lott analyzes the excess mortality around the world of Covid. (But, as he states, his computations don't deal with the patients who died with Covid instead of because of Covid.)
"My own personal experience turned me from being “mildly agnostic” about intermittent renewable power to being a strong opponent of such schemes."
I'm sorry, but I disagree. At least for micro, the AP curriculum and test seem designed to suck every last bit of joy out of economics. And the "rigor" is partly memorizing a lot of definitions that are dull and unproductive.