Assorted links

1. Every word counts.

2. Ron Jeremy moves into rum, but where are the Nina Hartley wine coolers?

3. Readers can't get enough of Smith and Todd (2005).

4. Will Wilkinson on libertarians and national defense.

5. An old Steve Chapman column on why we should perhaps be grateful to Ron Jeremy et al. I'm not the world's biggest fan of the sort of state-level panel studies that Chapman described, but in this case the sign of the time trend suffices to debunk the theory. If porn caused violence, it would have gone up, a lot, in the last 30 years. It hasn't.

Hat tip on #2 to Cheap Talk and on #4 to MR.

Mankiw on cross-cultural understanding

A nice post, in the form of an open letter to President Obama, from Greg Mankiw to start the year.

The only part I would change a bit is the redistribution part. The democrats would do better to focus on helping the poor, and not just with transfers, rather than taking from the "rich", by which they mean mainly productive professional people and small business owners.

I particularly liked this line:

Despite their rejection of spreading the wealth, Republicans recognize that times are hard for the less fortunate. Their solution is not to adjust the slices of the economic pie, as if they had been doled out by careless cutting, but to expand the pie by providing greater opportunity for all.

Also not mentioned, and worthy of an open letter to nearly all democrats, is a reminder that there are lots of intelligent, well-educated, thoughtful and well-intentioned people who, quite mysteriously, do not worship the state.

Should be an interesting year inside the Beltway.

Mississippi State 52, Michigan 14

Not much to say about this that is not implicit in the score. Michigan played poorly in pretty much the same ways that they did against every decent team they played this year.

Will Rich Rod get another season? Maybe not, though it seems late to be making a coaching change unless they have someone lined up.

Evidence-based medicine: flu vaccine

This Atlantic piece, now a few months old, shows the difficulty in really, really using the evidence to drive public health policy. Many of these same phenomena carry over into the world of labor market policy, such as the existence of dozens of studies, only a handful of which should receive non-zero weight in any serious synthesis of the evidence.

Assorted links

1. The UAW still (!) living in its own reality.

2. Cheap Talk on where to take the job market candidates to dinner.

3. Some cocktail history from the Atlantic. They've changed the title in the archive; the print magazine title is "Spirits of the Dead".

4. Jeffrey Goldberg breaks the rules and carries things on planes.

5. How to take apart an auto plant.

Free speech = fascism?

A former Congressman gets a bit confused about the definition of fascism, apparently as a result of having attended a government-run high school. Even more problematic, the Congressman appears ignorant of the fact that the US had no campaign finance regulation at all prior to 1971. Does Congressman Hall really think that the US was "fascist" from 1783 to 1971?

Hat tip: portside.org

Today

Happy New Year 2011 to all the readers of ECONJEFF!

I'm amazed that I've kept up with the blog this long ...