- A very nice article about GMU's Econ department. I love for instance the following bit, despite its capitalizing on stereotypes (but we love those sometimes :-)); so here's Arnold Kling: My simple way of describing it is that at Chicago they say, ‘Markets work; let’s use markets.’ At Harvard and MIT they say, ‘Markets fail; let’s use government.’ And at George Mason, we say, ‘Markets fail; let’s use markets.’”
- Barack Obama might be very good at writing books (see here my assessment of his most popular book); however, he fares pretty poorly so far, in his economics policies. Here's one of his worst ideas, for instance, rightly and well criticized on VoxEU. It is rather amazing that with some top economists as his advisors, Obama can actually support an economic proposal that is "reactionary, populist, xenophobic and just plain silly". One can only hope that Obama does all this nonsense economic campaigning for popular votes and he'd eventually get back to his senses if elected President... But could he deliver as President, as The Economist and probably most of us would like to know...?
- An excellent interview with Kip Viscusi, the specialist on individuals' assessment of risk, compensation policies for safety and health hazards, and so forth.
- Since I've been reading The Bottom Billion, by Paul Collier, here's Easterly's review of it, published October last year in the Lancet. Haven't yet finished the book, but so far I tend to agree with Bill Easterly (hmm, seems I often agree with Easterly, here's another recent instance). I saw of course Easterly, Collier, Acemoglu and Duflo (and George Soros, by videophone) debating in the panel discussion on development in Budapest, at the EEA 2007; also there Easterly's speech came forth as clearer (and better!) than Collier's (with Acemoglu and Duflo diplomatically not taking clear sides :-)). Soros was eventually better than I had expected, but promoting Collier's book somewhat too much :-).
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