Winter’s Haven

The Economist magazine, who really ought to know better, wrote that

A study by the Centre for Science in the Public Interest showed that soft drinks were the single biggest contributor to calories in the American diet…

This sentence conveys no information whatsoever. An example will serve to illustrate the problem. Suppose that every day I drink [...]

Rathergood wishes you a merry Communist Christmas!
Virginia Postrel writes about the psychology of bubbles.
And lastly, researchers read images off your visual cortex using MRI.

You absolutely must read Jeff Atwood’s article describing Swoopo.com. What is Swoopo? Commenter Septomin provides an eloquent summary: “someone read about the dollar auction and decided to turn it into a business plan.”. It’s a business model that will make every casino owner envious.
Lastly, I’d like to highlight a comment by Jacob (not me), [...]

…when you’ve got a financial engineer?

Hat tip to Greg Mankiw.

In the comments to a previous post, George W. raises a common concern regarding school choice schemes:

School-choice sounds great on paper, and I’d go along with it if there were strictly enforced standards for education content. Too often in this country it just boils down to keeping kids from learning about evolution and sex.

George is [...]

Mark Thoma argues that a major problem impeding the resolution of the financial crisis is

the complete breakdown of traditional information flows, and a loss of confidence in the models used to evaluate that information. Markets need information to work properly, and the information financial markets need is not available.
For example, investors can no longer [...]

Go take this short civics quiz. The quiz was also given to a random sample of American adults. Once you’ve finished, you can examine their scores to determine the percentage of the American public to which you may feel smugly superior.
I missed one question: I failed to identify the source of the phrase “Government of [...]

The Volokh Conspiracy bloggers have been wondering whether the Fed actually has the legal authority to bail out AIG in the manner it which it is doing. The Fed is authorized to extend credit to private firms, but the law does not give it authority to buy them; the law also does not explicitly forbid [...]

Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy eloquently summarizes my feelings on the recent political discourse. No, I’m not going to quote. Just go read it.
Note: if you don’t get it, then you’ve never seen this and have led an empty life up to the moment you click that link.

I’ve recently observed several people use the word “deconstruct” as a synonym for “analyze”. Let’s see what the dictionary says about “deconstruct”:

1. To break down into components; dismantle.
2. To write about or analyze (a literary text, for example), following the tenets of deconstruction.

A deconstruction is a particular type of analysis: one done in accordance with [...]