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1.  What is the political situation in the Mushroom Kingdom? 2.  Is bitcoin inherently deflationary? 3.  Are Germans the least wealthy people in the Eurozone?  And is Cyprus the 2nd-richest? 4.  PC...

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Mean Words About Bitcoin

How much stuff will a Bitcoin buy in a month?  A day?  An hour?  Nobody has any idea… Bitcoin isn’t a currency.  It’s a commodity.  A currency needs a relatively stable value to function as a medium...

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Is Delaying Infrastructure Spending Fiscally Irresponsible?

This is your fiscal policy on drugs delayed infrastructure spending. Andrew Samwick says the answer is “yes”: The best reason to do infrastructure spending in a downturn is not because of some mythical...

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This Is What Attacking an Inelastic Demand Curve Looks Like

In my post on food deserts, I suggested that the demand for unhealthy foods, like that of addictive drugs, is inelastic.  (That means that price changes have little effect on quantity consumed.) And...

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This Was Awesome

From my Twitter feed: Here is the original.  And you can watch Yankee Stadium playing “Sweet Caroline” here.

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Assorted Links

1.  Louis CK on race.  (short, brilliant, and totally safe for work) 2.  In praise of the Earned Income Tax Credit. 3.  Africa is a great country. 4.  The burqa business has seen better days. 5.  New...

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Low Growth Causes High Debt

Pick a country, any country, at any point in time, with a high debt-to-GDP ratio.  That ratio will be strongly correlated with low GDP growth in the last three years, not the next: That is from...

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The Real Lesson of Reinhart-Rogoff…

Like most ideas, this one is not original.  In this case I have pilfered it from @ECONOMISTHULK, one of the funniest and most insightful (but anonymous) economists on Twitter: Yep.  It should not have...

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Colbert Nailed It.

Watch and enjoy:   PS — Stewart’s was good too (and so was his Moment of Zen), but Colbert’s had me laughing and (almost) crying.   Update:  It turns out that Colbert was right.  At least one of the...

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Sentences About Debt

Robert Pollin and Michael Ash, who are co-authors of the paper challenging Reinhart-Rogoff, in the Financial Times write the following: It is also not true that the large deficits have created an...

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Surprisingly Not an Onion Article: Obama and Kerry Half-Tithe for Furloughed...

President Obama will voluntarily give back 5% of his salary this year to help draw attention to the sacrifice of federal employees who will see their pay go down from being furloughed in the coming...

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1.  “I lost 11 years of my life to the Internet.”  (video) 2.  Interview with the founder of GiveWell. 3.  How to live in an intellectual bubble. 4.  Crowdsourcing your medical bills. 5.  Obscure...

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Should the non-profit sector be taking over more government functions?

Got your citation right here. Here is an interesting proposal from Miles Kimball: My proposal is to raise marginal tax rates above about $75,000 per person—or $150,000 per couple—by 10% (a dime on...

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How to lie using statistics, Venezuelan election edition

Via Ben Goldacre, here is the election outcome that Skepchick is calling “World’s Tiniest Landslide”:   Really not that impressive. As seen on Venezolana de Televisión, Venezuela’s state-owned...

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In the House, Republicans Have More to Gain From Immigration Reform than...

And not just because Democrats have less room for improvement.  From the Georgetown Public Policy Review, we learn that in 2012: a dramatic shift in Hispanic support toward Democrats would have yielded...

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Assorted Links

1.  The Mike Rogers Challenge. 2.  Does pi contain every piece of information? 3.  What happens if you wring out a wet washcloth in space? 4.  Hans Rosling’s shortest lecture ever. 5.  Buddhist...

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The Humility of Bryan Caplan

Copyright © 2010 Universal Press Syndicate. (Source) Anyone who appreciates intellectual honesty ought to read this long-ish piece by Bryan Caplan: I know hundreds of free-market economists.  They’re...

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Yes, the GOP Needs to (Re-)Capture the Center

It needn’t come to this, but something’s gotta give. (Source) The proposition of IQ2′s latest debate was “The GOP Must Seize the Center or Die.”  David Brooks and Mickey Edwards argued for, and Laura...

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The Social Construction of an Islamic Race

(Source) Here is Peter Beinart: The day after last week’s attack in Boston, David Sirota wrote a column for Salon entitled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a White American,” arguing that this...

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Stewart on Conservative ≠ Libertarian

The other day I wrote that the definition “conservativism” given by Ralph Reed at the most recent IQ2 US debate was confused.  Ralph had defined conservativism simply as being a philosophy of small...

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