Newmark's Door

I didn't learn my economics from Heinlein but this takes me back anyway: I read a lot of Heinlein when I was a kid.

I enthusiastically voted for Mitt in 2016. But even as bad as Obama's second term was, this piece suggests we may well have dodged a bullet.

Review of Richard Hanania's new book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics.

I agree with this: "The right should stop 'owning the libs'  and focus on state power".

A review of a new documentary.

A very fine collection of free resources. Materials by, among many others, Bruce Hansen, Frank Diebold, John Cochrane, Peter Phillips, and Stock and Watson.

And by the same author, a list of econometrics video courses.

Quora discussion. Some good nominees, but missing many. Examples:

The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it. (For Whom the Bell Tolls)

A man can be destroyed but not defeated. (The Old Man and the Sea)

After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. (A Farewell to Arms)

The old man was dreaming about the lions. (The Old Man and the Sea)

Andrew Sullivan Ferguson--thanks, Seth!--reviews Jann Wenner's recent book, Like A Rolling Stone: A Memoir. Sample:

Over the last 50 years, roughly the lifespan of Rolling Stone, the defection of the white (and now, increasingly, the Hispanic) working class from the Democratic Party left limousine liberals a lot of room for redecoration. They turned the party into a kind of performance space, a stage for striking moral poses and issuing political mandates that always seem to require more from their fellow citizens than from themselves. The well-to-do activists of the Democratic Party, lucky them, get to have their Ben and Jerry’s Groovy Tie Dye Ice Cream Cake and eat it too. The meat-and-potatoes liberalism that shaped the party of Wenner’s youth seems a distant dream. It’s hard to imagine Eleanor Roosevelt posing in a backless number at the Met Gala or George Meany canvassing Martha’s Vineyard for John Kerry’s presidential campaign, as Wenner and his pal Larry David did in 2004.

By Marty Makary, professor at Johns Hopkins. Reason #4--China destroyed all records from the lab--always seemed powerful evidence to me.

Long but fascinating discussion in the Claremont Review of Books about the current state of play of affirmative action. Among the information presented: how affirmative action morphed into "diversity" and how Harvard's supposed acceptance of "Idaho farm boys" played a role in the Bakke decision.

Related: " Mainstream media is wrong about affirmative action".

Just awful:

Bernhardt describes various factors that contribute to the bureaucratic morass within administrative agencies: badly-written statutes that provide little guidance to regulators; labyrinthine organizational structures within agencies, padded with layers of career civil servants; weak agency heads unwilling (or unable) to manage the sprawling operations they oversee—serving as mere “figureheads” and allowing their agencies to run on “autopilot”; and even chaotic White House staffing arrangements that impede vital communication between agency heads and the president to whom they report. Fixing some of these problems requires action by Congress or (in the case of Chevron deference) the Supreme Court, but—in Bernhardt’s telling—a strong executive can make progress with forceful, decisive management. However, it is not easy: systemic problems elude simple solutions.