Archive for the 'DayToDay' Category

Mar3rd2010

The Effort To Keep Ethnic Studies Professors Employed

As someone who both grew up in Compton and attends UCSD, I feel compelled to comment on the recent race relation issues UCSD is having.  As most of you have probably already heard, the whole thing started when UCSD students, outside the campus, had a “Compton Cookout”, where participants were to wear “chains, rapper-style urban […]

May13th2008

Comencement Advice Worth Giving

P.J. O’Rourke, author of Eat The Rich, gives commencement advice worth giving:
1. Go out and make a bunch of money!
Here we are living in the world’s most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever […]

Mar24th2008

Quote Of The Day

“No developed country approaches American giving. For example, in 1995 (the most recent year for which data are available), Americans gave, per capita, three and a half times as much to causes and charities as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 times as much as the Italians. Similarly, in 1998, […]

Jan24th2008

Quote Of The Day

“So what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production to shared consumption. In case the language of economic lacks romance, let’s be clearer: modern marriage is about love and companionship. Most things in life are simply better shared with another. … […]

Nov28th2007

Quote Of The Day

” If we look at the history of Western civilization, we find that Christianity has illuminated the greatest achievements of the culture. Read the new atheist books and make a list of the institutions and values that Hitchens and Dawkins and the others cherish the most. They value the idea of the individual, and the […]

Oct6th2007

Quote Of The Day

“[Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence] Thomas was talking about how surprisingly positively he has been received in campuses around the country over the past two decades. It is mostly the faculty, not the students or the public that are tough on him. Of course, there are some law schools he does not expect an invitation […]

Aug27th2007

Shavar Jeffries On Michael Vicks Treatment

Yet another great post by Shavar Jeffries at Black Professors blog:
Ultimately, I find the entire Vick episode to be a comedy of the absurd. At the end of the day, he bet on dogfights, and subsidized an enterprise that sometimes wantonly killed dogs who weren’t top fighters. As a consequence, he’s already lost […]

Aug20th2007

Quote Of The Day

“Firstly, it’s easy to vilify banks for “predatory lending” practices when they sold strange and exotic mortgages to homeowners, but I don’t think that’s fair. “Predatory lending” kind of makes sense when your interest rate is usuriously high, and the borrower has no other options, but it boggles the mind to use that phrase when […]

Aug15th2007

The Difference Between Statistical Discrimination And Racism

It always annoys me when someone confuses true racism with statistical discrimination. VivirLatino gives a perfect example of that here. More on statistical discrimination here.

Dec26th2006

Love Monterrey, Hate The Airports

First some background: I came to Monterrey, Mexico in March of this year and had a horrible airport experience. Because of bad weather out of Tijuana our airplane was delayed. Since I had to make a connection with another plane in Guadalajara, that flight was missed as well. So after about five hours of waiting […]

Dec9th2006

Quote Of The Day

“If the Japanese had never attacked Pearl Harbor it is likely that America might have never entered WWII or might have done so bitterly divided. The events of December 7th 1941 so united the country that ever afterward we forgot just how viciously divided we truly were. We Americans like to think that we heroically […]

Dec4th2006

Austan Goolsbee On Milton Friedman

University of Chicago economics professor Austan Goolsbee writes in the New York Times:
A Charismatic Economist Who Loved to Argue
By AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
Published: November 17, 2006
Someone walked into our lunchroom yesterday at the University of Chicago and announced that Milton Friedman had died. Mr. Friedman spent his intellectual life here, so I started asking people here about […]

Nov29th2006

Quote Of The Day

“Galbraith was a very, very good writer, but he was not a very good economist. His economic history is entertaining, but it is not theoretically sound, and his major theories, captured in The New Industrial State, were almost comically wrong. The book was being proven incorrect by history virtually as he wrote it. His tirades […]

Nov27th2006

The New York Times On Milton Friedman

The New York Times has a good overview of just who Milton Friedman was and how important he was to world economics:
Milton Friedman, Free Markets Theorist, Dies at 94
Milton Friedman, the grandmaster of free-market economic theory in the postwar era and a prime force in the movement of nations toward less government and greater reliance […]

Nov25th2006

The Other Milton Friedman: A Conservative With a Social Welfare Program

Robert Frank, an economist at the Johnson School of Cornell University, writes in the New York Times:
The Other Milton Friedman: A Conservative With a Social Welfare Program
By ROBERT H. FRANK
Published: November 23, 2006
Milton Friedman, who died last week at 94, was the patron saint of small-government conservatism. Conservatives who invoke his name in defense of […]

Nov24th2006

Larry Summers On Milton Friedman

Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, and Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, writes on Milton Friedman:
The Great Liberator
By LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS
Published: November 19, 2006
Brookline, Mass.
IF John Maynard Keynes was the most influential economist of the first half of the 20th century, then Milton Friedman was the most influential economist of the second half.
Not so […]