Where do you go to buy Obama?

At the Obama store of course! The store is located in the lower level of Union Station in DC.

I suspect that the people who gawked at me while I was taking the picture mistook the nature of my interest.

The Case of Dickens v. Wicked Love

Porn drove the internet and apparently romance porn (sans pictures) is driving ebooks. Kind of warms an economist's heart (yes, we do have them).

Surely we should be subsidizing this industry as part of the "stimulus" package (if not based on an argument that lots of secretly stimulated readers are a public good)?

Hat tip: marginal revolution

Washington 67 WSU 60

Washington wins the PAC-10 championship outright for the first time since 1953!

Here is the Seattle Times story.

1953 was shortly after my father graduated from Washington. The Huskies last shared championship was my last year as an undergrad at Washington.

Smart and hot, hot, hot!

Advice from McSweeney's on how to obtain the highly coveted chili pepper of hotness on ratemyprofessor.com.

Hat tips: two separate guilty colleagues who I suspect would prefer to remain anonymous.

Obama on Education

Is education

(a) a right;
(b) a duty;
(c) both (a) and (b);
(d) none of the above?

I would go with (d), but recent remarks by President Obama quoted on the blog at reason.com take a lean towards (b). I suspect he would sign on with (a) as well and thus give (c) as his answer.

Modern "liberalism" is often characterized by the idea that government should aim to provide individuals with opportunities to realize their "full potential". I am not unsympathetic to this version of "liberalism" but I am with the Reason blogger that going beyond opportunities to mandates is an illiberal move in either the modern or classical sense.

I think the issue, though, is less clear-cut than Jacob Sullum, the reason blogger, makes it out to be. From a classical liberal perspective, or simply from an economic perspective, there is a countervailing issue. Given that we have a well-developed transfer system, and given that high school dropouts differently take advantage of that transfer system and so impose a net tax burden on the rest of the citizenry, pushing them to at least finish high school, and more generally pushing people to obtain enough of the right kind of human capital to at least be self-supporting, becomes optimal in a second best sense. One distortion, namely the moral hazard implicit by the transfer system, gets mitigated in part by another.

Trade-offs everywhere. That's what makes it interesting.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

IHS Summer Seminars

I did one of these seminars run by the Institute for Humane Studies back in my college days and really enjoyed it. The lectures are "classical liberal" types but the discussion is open and engaged. It is sort of a week-long dorm room bull session and so great fun for all concerned.

My recollection is that I most enjoyed the discussions of foreign policy which was what I knew the least about at the time. There was also lots of discussion of the anarchist versus minarchist positions and of the relative virtues of rights-based versus rule-utilitarian views.

Maybe someday IHS will ask me to lecture. More worrisome is the potential that they may ask me to review applications (as they would be quite justified in doing, having given me fellowships back in my gradual student days).

Journal etiquette

Here is an odd fact that I am unclear how to interpret: In my recent life as a journal editor, I have received three thank-you emails from authors of papers I have rejected who appreciated the comments and zero thank-you emails from authors of papers I have accepted. Indeed, the most troublesome of all authors I have dealt with was the author of the first paper I accepted at JOLE.