Shockingly, it’s difficult to keep up a blog while finishing a Ph.D., designing a new course, and looking for jobs. I have some drafts of substantive posts that I hope to polish up and publish soon. For now, some more links.<\/p>\n
A good, subtle point about imputed rent in a letter to the editor<\/a> of the Economist<\/em> by Matt Carey, from the August 10 edition. Also see the bottom letter there<\/a>, by the witty Bryan Dunlap, on entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n If you can get behind the New Yorker<\/em> paywall, a really interesting profile by Henry Louis Gates of Albert Murray<\/a>, the African-American cultural critic who recently<\/a> died. Interesting discussion of, among other things, Murray’s complicated relationship with Ralph Ellison.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Good point<\/a> from Matt Yglesias on Amazon and profitability.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Graeme Wood has an interesting article<\/a> in the Atlantic<\/em> about a US soldier who defected to North Korea several decades ago.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n As an undergrad at Stanford, I remember reading the Ph.D. comics in the Daily<\/em> and being perplexed. Now that I’m a grad student, they’re great–except that only an increasingly small fraction of them are funny. Question: Is this<\/a> cartoon inspired by this much-funnier version of the joke in xkcd<\/a>?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Dylan Matthews on Breaking Bad<\/a>: what it gets right and wrong. Thank you, especially, for discussing that weird obsession with purity. Let’s think about economics, everyone!<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Interesting argument<\/a> by Brian Palmer in Slate<\/em> against annual checkups.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n The poll Which famous economist are you most similar to?<\/a> isn’t as useful as simply answering the questions and then clicking on the questions to see other economists’ answers. (It’s particularly useful to see where you disagree with the consensus of economists; the site can highlight these for you.)<\/p>\n As I answered questions, I bopped around a lot between closest economists; I ended up with Christopher Udry. The things I care most about—Pigovian taxation, etc.—are, as pointed out in the faq<\/a>, widely agreed on by economists across the political spectrum.<\/p>\n One thing I noticed was that there were a few few questions of the form “A causes B”, where B is something that is implied to be good. I might agree that this proposition is true but nonetheless think that B isn’t in fact good. Here we see judgment aggregation paradoxes<\/a> coming up again! If the question is really getting at “Do you think A” is good, then perhaps the most honest answer is not to answer the question literally.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Shockingly, it’s difficult to keep up a blog while finishing a Ph.D., designing a new course, and looking for jobs. I have some drafts of substantive posts that I hope to polish up and publish soon. For now, some more links. Interesting article on the relationship between people’s behavior and the lunar cycle, from the … <\/p>\n