Whew.
9 years ago
Monday, November 26, 2018
My past self speaking at the AEI
I was at AEI a couple of weeks ago and, with the help of Michael Strain, who was sitting next to me, managed to re-find this video of my past self speaking at a 2012 event which had disappeared from the AEI webpage. I do not usually enjoy watching myself on video, but I watched this one and did not mind it too much, perhaps because the remarks have held up relatively well.
Saturday, November 24, 2018
Assorted links
1. A fascinating orgtheory.net post about spending a day with a leading art dealer.
2. Sometimes a folding chair is just a folding chair. The history of Franklin in Peanuts.
3. Defacing Soviet statues in Bulgaria. I really like the one with Ronald McDonald.
4. A fine rant by Alex Tabbarok on the too-high cost of getting anything done.
2. Sometimes a folding chair is just a folding chair. The history of Franklin in Peanuts.
3. Defacing Soviet statues in Bulgaria. I really like the one with Ronald McDonald.
4. A fine rant by Alex Tabbarok on the too-high cost of getting anything done.
Sunday, November 18, 2018
Marvels of the past: Northwest Orient Gong Edition
No one believes me when I say that these commercials used to end with a gong. They did.
Monday, November 5, 2018
Can the end times be far behind?
The Boston Globe endorses a Libertarian Party candidate for statewide office in Massachusetts.
Sunday, November 4, 2018
Family Feud: Gilligan's Island vs. Batman
This bit of pop cultural history works on many dimensions of social and technological history.
My favorite bit is when the Skipper can't come up with an answer for the question "name an actor who is also a political activist". Those were the days of specialization and division of labor ...
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Book: The Economist's Diet by Christopher Payne and Rob Barnett
Payne, Christopher, and Rob Barnett. 2018. The Economist's Diet: The Surprising Formula for Losing Weight and Keeping It Off. Touchstone Books.
The book does not really provide a diet at all, in the sense of lists of things to eat or lists of calories to count. Rather, it describes the rules of thumb that a couple of humble and entertaining economists came up with in the course of their respective weight loss adventures. Some bits of advice will not surprise: simply eating less plays a big role in their success. They frame the eating less as having one "regular" (they call it square) meal each day and two small-to-medium meals, rather than three squares. Reasonable enough, and the next square meal is never too far away. They say not to drink your calories, except beer. But what if you are a member of the wine economists' association? And they recommend weighing yourself every day. Indeed, they ascribe great power and insight to the daily ups and downs that they study via their informal mental time series analysis. I was less convinced by this part; my sense has always been that day-to-day fluctuations in weight have too much other stuff in them to justify much in the way of substantive conclusions. Maybe you have to be a macro to buy into that part of the scheme.
Fun stuff and an easy read, plus a couple of useful mind games to play on yourself that I had not heard of before; if the title sounds interesting, you will probably enjoy it.
Amazon page.
Barnes and Noble page.
The book does not really provide a diet at all, in the sense of lists of things to eat or lists of calories to count. Rather, it describes the rules of thumb that a couple of humble and entertaining economists came up with in the course of their respective weight loss adventures. Some bits of advice will not surprise: simply eating less plays a big role in their success. They frame the eating less as having one "regular" (they call it square) meal each day and two small-to-medium meals, rather than three squares. Reasonable enough, and the next square meal is never too far away. They say not to drink your calories, except beer. But what if you are a member of the wine economists' association? And they recommend weighing yourself every day. Indeed, they ascribe great power and insight to the daily ups and downs that they study via their informal mental time series analysis. I was less convinced by this part; my sense has always been that day-to-day fluctuations in weight have too much other stuff in them to justify much in the way of substantive conclusions. Maybe you have to be a macro to buy into that part of the scheme.
Fun stuff and an easy read, plus a couple of useful mind games to play on yourself that I had not heard of before; if the title sounds interesting, you will probably enjoy it.
Amazon page.
Barnes and Noble page.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
