D. B. Cooper

According to the Daily Mail, the FBI thinks it may have finally found D.B. Cooper, the early 70s hijacker who parachuted out of a Northwest Orient (as they were back then) plane over southern Washington State and was never found.

Cooper became a bit of a folk hero; wikipedia has a whole separate page about his appearances in popular culture. There is even a song, the "Ballad of D.B. Cooper," that received some radio attention, at least in the Pacific Northwest. And, particularly in the wake of 9/11, his antics do have an innocence to them. No one was hurt, he didn't take all that much money, and he was pushing no political or religious agenda other than the enrichment of D.B. Cooper. There are worse things.

I have a very slight personal connection to old D.B. Cooper as my father, who had just been working at the Seattle-Tacoma airport for a year or so at the time of the hijacking, was called out to the airport that night, though as I recall he ended up doing nothing other than standing around and watching the proceedings.

And, what are we to make of the Daily Mail calling it the Tacoma International Airport? Not hardly. At the time, Tacoma was best known locally for the awful smell that emitted from a large smelter.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

BBQ in Ann Arbor

I've been meaning to post a shout-out for Satchel's BBQ for a while now. It is a very fine addition to the local restaurant scene and great for take-out too. My favorites are the ribs and the brisket. Plus it is low attitude, with friendly staff and reasonable prices.

Debt ceiling

Megan McArdle has a very nice summary of the likely effects of not raising the debt ceiling (an unlikely outcome in my view - I predict another short term delay in the deadline) and of dithering about raising the deadline and demonstrating institutional and personal failure at the highest levels while doing so.

It seems to me that it is not really that hard to do the two things one wants to do: not cut current spending too much but cut future spending a lot in a way that has some credibility, which is to say in a way that is hard to reverse.

Rejecting theories in international relations

Daniel Drezner wonders if it is time for the McDonald's theory of international conflict to go.

More on Mark Thoma

Larry Summers has an excellent response with which I largely agree.

I would only quibble with the failure to focus on variation across subfields in economics. This is important not for blame assignment, but because the existing equilibria differ across fields as do the possibilities for credible empirical work. There can be no "credibility revolution" in the study of business cycles, for example, because we will never have plausible exogenous variation in them. That does not mean that we should give up, but it does mean that macro is necessarily different from, say, labor economics or the micro part of development economics (which, at present, is essentially all of development economics, though that was not the case in the past).

I also liked the response by Ashwin Parameswaran.

My original response is here, which includes a link to the Thoma piece on professors and practitioners.

Happy 99th Milton

A fine birthday tribute, with video, for Milton Friedman, courtesy of reason.

I particularly like the emphasis on the process - of following arguments wherever they lead and of speaking truth to power and taking on conventional "wisdom" - that Friedman did such a fine job of demonstrating.

Oxford comma

A fine meditation on language, by way of commas in lists.

Via Chris Blattman