Assorted links

1. The map of (heavy) metal

2. A wise piece from Thomas Friedman on Hillary Clinton

3. Deeply horrifying video of the 1996 democrat convention, featuring Hillary as a Stepford wife.

4. I agree with John Cochrane (and by extension the marginal revolutionaries) on NSF. Data is a public good, summer ninths are not. NSF should just be funding data, and maybe grad students.

Hat tip on #1 to Stephane Mahuteau and on #2 to the deputy dean, who denies being the unnamed colleague responsible for #3.

Book: Japan 1941

Hotta, Eri. 2013. Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. New York: Knopf.

This book presents a political history from a skeptical Japanese perspective of the period leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. The history gets denser as the day of infamy gets closer in time. I found the book fascinating as I knew essentially nothing about the internal politics of Japan in the interwar period. The book makes the case that a combination of cultural (saving face, etc.) and institutional (too much shared responsibility) factors led to a war that, had you somehow collected the honest opinions of the major players, most of the Japanese leadership did not want.

Recommended if the subject is of interest.

Amazon page
Barnes and Noble page

Movie: Cafe Society

It is a Woody Allen movie, so you know what you are getting. I liked it better than A.O. Scott but he does a fine job of laying out the strengths and weaknesses.

He does not mention my favorite line, which is "Socrates says that the unexamined life is not worth living; the examined life is no bargain either."

Recommended if you like Woody Allen movies.

Something to listen to next time you get a jerky referee report

Some clever person should do a version of this using the vast supply of intellectually narrow and misogynist comments from "econjobrumors".

Hat tip: Lizzie

Assorted links

1. JJH on the NFL draft - yes, a couple of months late, but still worth reading on several levels.

2. I wonder if a study of resumes on on-line job sites would yield the same findings.

3. The economist on Donald supporters on the Donald.

4. Nick Gillespie on the (yawn) Olympics. I always say that I will start watching again when they no longer identify the country associated with each athlete and instead have them compete as individuals. Probably that's not true - I never liked them that much anyway - but I doubt that my claim will ever be tested empirically.

Ann Arbor up in smoke

My first reaction to this headline about the Ann Arbor city council banning the sale of cigarettes to individuals ages 18 to 21 is that it is odd that they would have the power to do this. Reading the article, it seems likely that they do not actually have the power to do it, though in a narrower sense than my initial reaction had in mind.

This looks to me like a bunch of pointless moral posing by local pols at public expense, and thus yet another lesson in the difficulties of solving principal-agent problems. If the city council really does not have anything better to do, they should come over to my neighborhood and fix the appalling potholes.

More substantively, it seems to me to that if you are old enough to vote you ought to be old enough to buy cigarettes and alcohol. Politicians are a lot more dangerous than a few puffs of tobacco smoke or a beer. Indeed, that point is made by this very episode.

Movie: Jason Bourne

Bourne, again?

I liked it more than A.O. Scott, who I think feels a bit guilty about liking it as much as he did. The review is Scott at his snarky and insightful best. An example:

This is perhaps the most striking feature of “Jason Bourne”: Virtually all the major characters — good, bad and in-between — work for the same organization, at least on a consulting basis. There are dark whispers about external threats, and invocations of the tension between security and privacy in the digital age, but geopolitics and technology are scaffolding for what is essentially a movie about human resources challenges in a large bureaucracy.

Maybe it was this labor economics angle that drew me in?