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 […]
Archive for the 'DayToDay' Category
May13th2008
Comencement Advice Worth Giving
Published by in Academia, DayToDay, Economics and General. 7 CommentsMar24th2008
“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
“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
” 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
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Books, DayToDay and General. 3 Comments“[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
Published by in DayToDay, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 2 CommentsYet 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
“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
Published by in DayToDay, Discrimination, Economics and General. 7 CommentsIt 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
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
“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
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
“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 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
Published by in DayToDay, Economics, General and Welfare. 0 CommentsRobert 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, 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 […]
Nov20th2006
This time a much shorter tribute to a great economist:
The World Turner
Milton Friedman died at the age of 94. Over his long life, he had the satisfaction of seeing the world turn in his direction.
Friedman was born in New York in 1912, at the end of a long period of peace and prosperity. The […]
