Belated April Fool's Day

A fine April Fool's post from Brookings. My favorite bit:

Scholar calls for lowering Social Security retirement age

Bloomberg – While many budgetary experts inside the beltway have called for cuts to entitlements, Brookings senior fellow Isabel Sawhill argues that the retirement age at which Social Security benefits kick in should be lowered. “Did you know that almost 10 percent of all federal dollars are spent on children?” Sawhill said. “That’s just wacko spending that much money on kids. These $300 billion or so should be in the pockets of the elderly. Obama has all this nonsense talk about winning the future. What does that even mean? Let’s give AARP a win.”

What's AARP's win-loss record at these days, 500-0?

Neoclassical liberalism

I am not quite sure yet how to fit this definition of neoclassical liberalism into what I think of as my Hayekian rule utilitarianism, but it is surely worth thinking about. I do think that "high liberals" often downgrade economic liberties both because they sometimes do not understand much economics and because their personal experience outside the academic and government worlds is often limited.

I wish I had more time to read philosophy. I read a fair amount of political philosophy in my undergrad and early (i.e. pre-Heckman) graduate student days but not very much since then.

Ratios matter in search markets

Dollars and Sex summarizes recent research on the effects of student body sex composition on college student social behavior.

Of course, this analysis assumes that students do not heavily weight the student body sex composition when deciding where to attend. That's likely not a bad approximation, but worth studying. More broadly, publicizing results like this might be the most effective policy tool for pushing the sex composition back toward equality.

Assorted links

1. Miley Cyrus doesn't like competition.

2. More on the John Taylor graph.

3. Humorous sociology t-shirts from orgtheory.net. I like the one about formalization.

4. On empirical evidence of the failure of capitalism. My example is White Castle.

5. The Honest Courtesan on unchanging human nature and the "other". I'm more optimistic than she is on this one, in large part because of the amazing change in the cultural treatment of homosexuality in the US during my lifetime.

What's your golden parachute (African dictator edition)?

An interesting tidbit from an article on the fighting in Ivory Coast to displace the recalcitrant predecessor to the democratically elected incoming president.

In the four months since the disputed election, the international community has repeatedly offered [defeated president] Gbagbo a golden parachute, only to be rebuffed. He twice refused to take a phone call from President Barack Obama, who offered him a teaching position at a Boston university if he agreed to peacefully step aside.

Several thoughts come to mind:

1) Is the Kennedy School developing a new MA program for dictators? Will it offer a "Masters in Dictatorial Administration"? I bet there would be a good market in this, and they could charge high fees (with a separately priced option, of course, for personal assistance with the master's thesis).

2) Maybe Gbagbo thought the teaching load was too high? Or perhaps they could not find a lecturing position for his spouse?

3) Is there some reason to think that a teaching position in "a Boston university" would be more attractive than, say, a villa in some central american country?

Worth taking a moment here, too, to be grateful for the social capital in the Western democracies that leads to the peaceful and regular political transitions we take for granted. It doesn't have to be that way.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Green policy advances

Two Western Washington university economists take the (sadly, gated) natural next step after Buy Local!

Hat tip: Jason Winfree

Kevin Drum, tool

You can choose between Radley Balko's takedown and Brian Doherty's takedown.

It really isn't about which team wins this week. It is actually about trying to get the best policies.