You'll be as excited to learn as I was that the UN has declared 2013 to be the International Year of the Quinoa.Sigh.Via: the Econom...
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Monday, December 24, 2012
2012 is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".Longtime readers may recall that Kuhn's book made it onto my list of books that had the largest intellectual influence on me. For me, recasting the history of science in terms of paradigm shifts mattered less than recasting science itself as a social enterpirse. Some related thoughts from the Guardian and from David Warsh at Economic Principals.If you have not read the book, it remains well worth readi...
This article on vote fraud from the New Yorker got passed around a lot before the election but, having read it, I think oddly so. The main point seems not to be about whether or not there is vote fraud, but that some red team activists use vote fraud as a wedge issue and sometimes don't get the facts right. Is it really news that activists of any flavor make stuff up in pursuit of thier political objectives?More broadly, this, like voting rights for felons, seems like an amazingly bad issue for the blue team to push on. First, it is transparently...
1. Sometimes Social Security stinks for reasons other than its weak design.2. Cool old computers that people still use. I have a working Kaypro II that runs CP/M but it does not get used much.3. Some rare good news from the war on (some) drugs, courtesy of Colorado and Washington.4. Famous writer Cosmo tips from McSweeny's.5. A day in the life of an awfully serious University of Washington undergraduate. Where were the food carts when when I was student?Hat tip on #5 to Charlie Bro...
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Shields, Carol. 2001. Jane Austen. New York: Penguin.This is one of the Penguin Lives series of short biographies. Though a hardcover, it is trade paperback size and just 185 pages. The books are a bit pricey, but I have mangaged to find several of them at used book stores or sales - this particular one at a sale at the University of Toronto.As it turns out, not all that much is known about Jane Austen's life, particularly the early bits. She grew up in modest, but not impoverished, circumstances, and it was not clear that she...
According to the Daily Mail, Delta Airlines has received 22,000 applications for 300 flight attendant jobs.Missing from the Daily Mail piece is the obvious conclusion, which is that Delta either pays its flight attendants too much or makes its application process too easy or, more likely, both.Hat tip: Charlie Br...
Washington played pretty well, including coming back from an 18-3 deficit in the first half, but not well enough in the end. Thus ends the Huskies' third 7-6 season in a row. Thus starts a bit of grumbling too, I suspect, in Huskyland. Everyone much prefers Sarkisian and 7-6 to 0-8 under Willingham to be sure, but it is time, one hears, to take the next step, and get up into the region of 8-10 wins a year. The Huskies get to start next season, and to start life in the remodeled version of Husky Stadium, and to start taking the next step,...
Saturday, December 22, 2012
I had been wondering why my old friend Laura Hartman - I was the external reviewer on her dissertation long ago and her post-dissertation party at the Hotel Linne set a standard that has not yet been exceeded - suddenly left the Swedish think-tank SNS in 2011 to return to Uppsala University. Now I know. Good for Laura.The blogger reporting on the affair goes off the rails a bit at the end of the post but the basic point that SNS blew it, and not in a small way, is surely correct. Perhaps the comparisons to Stalin can wait, though, until...
I had not heard about this before reading this article but it sounds pretty bad.I am not sure why it is comforting that it was about the department budget (which presumably depended on undergraduate bums in classroom chairs, as they often do either directly or indirectly) rather than about athletic succe...
The New York Times magazine does a piece on Jerry Seinfeld.I particularly liked this bit:Almost from the beginning, Seinfeld has forsworn graphic language in his bits, dismissing it as a crutch.I don't mind cursing and smut, but it is not elegant and, as usually applied in stand-up comedy, not very clever....
Mueenuddin, Daniyal. 2009. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. New York: W.W. Norton.Mueenuddin grew up in both Pakistan and the US, including along the way an undergraduate degree in English at Dartmouth, and so is rather uniquely positioned to write a book of short stories about Pakistan, with a special emphasis on life among the relatively well-off. The stories provide a window into worlds most Americans will never see, and so function as sociology or travelogue as well as fiction. Mueenuddin does not shy from the blunt or unpleasant in pursuit of...
Steve Kelly of the Seattle Times interviews ABC/ESPN announcer Brent Musberger, who is doing the play-by-play for today's bowl game featuring Washington against Boise State. With Keith Jackon and John Madden retired, I think Brent is probably my favorite college football announcer, at least on television. The bowl game is at 3:30 Eastern today on ESPN. Boise State is, suprisingly to my mind, favored by five....
Friday, December 21, 2012
Megan has a really thoughtful take on many dimensions of last week's school shooting.I particularly like the focus on thinking cooly, calmly and realistically about what policy can accomplish and what it cannot as well as her suggestion of a cooling off period before period before policy gets done in the wake of the media frenzy following a dramatic event.Hat tip: Dan Bl...
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Bob is the former editor and publisher of reason magazine - that's what he was doing back in the day when I was the reason summer intern - and, later, the former president of the reason foundation. Now he does transportation policy full time.I found his Congressional testimony on airport security screening useful; there was more that I did not already know than I expect...
Another of my blue team economist facebook friends (let's call him/her G, and G is only the latest of many in recent days) just posted a small-n univariate regression (in the form of a two-dimensional scatterplot with a line) on facebook that is intended to imply policy conclusions about gun control. Rather than scream, or write a snarky comment on facebook, I will simply note that this economist, and all the others before him/her, would mercilessly mock anyone who offered a similar type of evidence in a policy domain related to their...
Annarbor.com on the university's purchase of the building that houses iconic Ann Arbor burger joint Blimpys. I think pushing Blimpy's out is a mistake on the university's part. The "cool college town" aspect of Ann Arbor attracts both students and faculty. Blimpy's is part of that vibe. There are also plenty of other places the university could expand that would be less disruptive to the cultural fabric.Read about the Facebook petition he...
Hell hath no fury like an Atlantic assistant editor scorned.Molly is correct that the Black and Nagin piece (helpfully provided on Lott's website) is the best critique of the Lott and Mustard work but, at least relative to the last time I looked, gives a somewhat misleading take on the literature as a whole, which is decidedly mix...
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Some thoughts on the school shootings:1. My heart goes out to the familes of the children. I have been surprised, as a relatively new parent, just how strong the bond of affection is between parent and child.2. I liked this piece from the Telegraph. Indeed, it is almost the only thing I have read or seen that I thought was very serious.3. How sad that we honor the fallen children by having a festival of confirmation bias (and I have in mind both the red and blue teams in this regard).4. Why don't Americans engage in loud, public displays of...
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Monday, December 17, 2012
1. Danny Bonaduce, who played Danny Partridge in the Partridge Family TV show, is now a disc jockey on KZOK-FM in Seattle, which is the radio station I listened to in high school and which, in an amazing display of consistency, still plays exactly the same music it did then, though now it calls it "classic rock" instead of "album-oriented rock".2. Ann B. Davis, who played Alice the maid in the Brady Bunch TV show (which was on just before the Partridge Family each Friday night) graduated from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) in 1948 with a...
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Good stuff, and entertaining on multiple levels.I especially like his gruff dismissal of the interviewer's sillier questions and his claim that critics are too scared to say anything negative about Jane Austen.I read A House for Mr. Biswas in my student days and was quite impressed with it.Among the Believers, which I read more recently, is the most effective critique of the sad current state of political Islam that you will ever read, in large part because it is indire...
Friday, December 14, 2012
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
1. Very cool 3-D sidewalk art.2. Health care waiting lists around the world. Rationing by waiting is really inefficient.3. The Atlantic on my graduate school colleague Matt Khan on moral hazard, government and natural disasters.4. Say it ain't so Joe. What world does this guy live in?5. Chicago's fattest (as one of my grad school buddies used to call them) at work. And then it gets even better.#2 via John Cochrane's blog, and #4 via the Agita...
The Flat is a documentary about what an Israeli filmmaker learns about his family from the things he finds in his grandmother's flat in Tel Aviv after her passing. Those things are awkward, but interesting, as are the reactions they provoke. The end result provokes thinking on many levels, about family, about how we present ourselves to others and about the relationship between the personal and the historical.This is the best movie I have seen in a while. NYT likes it t...
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Okay, this is slightly old news, but I remain surprised the Cal dumped head football coach Jeff Tedford. There have been a lot of injuries the past couple of years, as well as some turnover (partly due to Washington) at the lower levels of the coaching hierarchy. More broadly, what makes them think they will find another coach this good? Cal is not a great football place. I would have given him another year. It wasn't that long ago that Washington was trying to lure him away to replace Tyrone Willingham.In possibly unrelated news, Cal has an ugly...
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Kentucky bans atheism, dares sinners to mock it. Just kidding about the daring part. This is a pretty sad business. Seems to me that if you can only get people to adopt your religion (whether it be some flavor of Christianity, or of Islam, or of communism or whatever) by threatening them with violence, then your religion deserves nothing but disda...
From the New York Review of Books, some very good bits from P.J. O'Rourke. My favorite bit:What are your reading habits? Paper or electronic? Do you take notes? Do you snack while you read?Behold the book with its brilliant, nonlinear search engine called flipping-through-the-pages. A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll except with batteries and electronic glitches. It’s as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the “Iliad” while playing a lyre. I dog-ear all my books, underline passages and scribble “Huh?” and “How true!”...
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Saturday, November 24, 2012
I will confess that I did not really pay much attention to, nor have a very high opinion of, Martha Stewart until she was unjustly imprisoned in order to help advance Eliot Spitzer's career.Now I am rather fascinated by her and her empire of domesticity. Much of what she promotes strikes me as tremendous wastes of time, but, you know, one should not criticize the harmless leisure activities of others.In any case, the FT offers up an entertaining interview. I had no idea she is ...
Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative IncubationBenjamin Baird, Jonathan Smallwood, Michael D. Mrazek, ,Julia W. Y. Kam, Michael S. Franklin1 and Jonathan W. SchoolerPsychological Science October 2012 23(10): 1117–1122AbstractAlthough anecdotes that creative thoughts often arise when one is engaged in an unrelated train of thought date back thousands of years, empirical research has not yet investigated this potentially critical source of inspiration. We used an incubation paradigm to assess...
Friday, November 23, 2012
Thursday, November 22, 2012
We saw Skyfall, the new Bond movie, on Tuesday night. It is definitely the best of the Daniel Craig Bond movies. Craig's version of Bond is much richer here - still rougher than all of the previous Bonds but also more human and more interesting. Amazing locations and music too. I think this one goes in the upper quartile of Bond movies.The NYT likes it too.Recommend...
I am reminded this morning of something that Bob Lucas told us during orientation for the graduate program in economics at Chicago. This is a paraphrase - it has been 27 years after all - but the gist was:"I really like working on Thanksgiving and Christmas because nobody calls."Happy Thanksgiving to a...
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Monday, November 19, 2012
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Back when I was working at U of Maryland and living at Chevy Chase, I would sometimes arrange my commute so that I could have lunch in Chinatown, as that was a natural place to switch from the red line to the green line.Often I would have Chinese food, but other times I would go to the Capital Q. I liked it both because the BBQ was good and because I felt like it functioned as a sort of temporary refuge for regular people trapped inside the beltway vortex.I am sad that it is gone.More generally, it is great that the area around Chinatown is doing...
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Michigan Daily columnist Melanie Kruvelis on the stigma of electoral abstention. Nice work.I will be voting on Tuesday, mainly because it is cheap here and a modestly entertaining cultural experience as well. I still quite vividly remember voting for the first time in the fall of 1980. I voted for John Anderson for president. Remember him? No, you probably don't. In any event, ahead of me in line was a stoner wearing an Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt. Realizing that the two of us would have the same influence on the election was an epiphany...
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Friday, October 26, 2012
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Nate Seegert hits a pre-job-market home run as his job market paper is cited on both Marginal Revolution and Ezra Klein's blog at the WaPo.Congrats to Nate, whose job market paper I quite like as well.We have other great candidates too .... seven of them with letters from yours truly.Hat tip: Jessica Goldb...
This may be the worst game Washington has played all year. Unlike LSU and Oregon, Arizona is good but not great. The Huskies should have been close, if not the winners. And yet they got blown out, in large part due to their own mistakes.This one actually has caused some grumbling in Seattle, as Jerry Brewer describes in his colu...
Sunday, October 21, 2012
The NYT offers this thoughtful piece on the video that, for a few days, was the cause of the raid on the US embassy compound in Libya and on the broader issues it raises.It seems to me that we are repeating the same error we made during the Cold War. Liberalism, in the broad sense, is a vastly superior product to communism. That case could have been, and should have been, made without apology. Liberalism is also a far better product than theocracy, whether Christian or Muslim or otherwise. That case, too, can and should be made without apology...
Saturday, October 20, 2012
There is surely a paper topic in this piece from the Daily Mail (and not just for Jeremy Greenwood).When will the blue team propose heavy taxes on labor-saving household appliances as part of the battle against obesity? I am not holding my breath but I do wonder why is this any different than sugary drinks.Hat tip: Charlie Br...
I started this a long time ago:Obama's remark that business people did not build their businesses has occasioned one of the odder bouts of internet discussion I can ever recall. It is not silly in the way the week we spent debating whether it was worse to put your sick dog on top of your car or to actually eat dogs was silly, but it is silly nonetheless, because everyone knows that creators are special, and everyone also knows that creators being able to create depends on many factors that are "produced" at a social level. Some of those factors...
"Ocularcentric Labour: 'You Don’t Do this for Money'" Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, Vol. 67, No. 3, 2012JENNIFER SAPPEY, Charles Sturt UniversityEmail: jsappey@csu.edu.auGLENDA MACONACHIE, Queensland University of Technology - School of ManagementEmail: g.maconachie@qut.edu.auThis article is a response to Lansbury’s call (2009) in this journal for a reconceptualization of work and employment. It supports Lansbury’s belief that the employment relationship cannot be understood in isolation from wider social change. Building...
Friday, October 19, 2012
Sunday, October 14, 2012
This is hilarious, and very much on point. I have managed to find a GP who will actually respond to emails (thanks, Gary) but he really doesn't like it. The discussion I had with my dermatologist about using email was hilarious at some level (his office doesn't "trust" email, whatever that might mean) but ultimately fruitless as well.Hat tip: Ken Troske, who got it from John Cochr...
Friday, October 12, 2012
The NYT review sums it up well:"Butter” alternates between looking down its nose at Midwestern passions and cooing over smugly liberal values." Needless to say, this played well with the Ann Arbor audience last night at the Michigan Theater. There was even a bit of misplaced applause at the end. Still, it is well-acted enough, and funny enough at times, that I am glad to have seen it.The high point of the evening was listening to a loud fellow-movie goer afterwards in the lobby talking about how she thought the movie featured Jennifer...
Monday, October 8, 2012
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Today is ECONJEFF's 50th birthday. However did this happen?Also celebrating their birthday today (among others): my college roommate Ian Challis, my graduate school friend Sheilagh Ogilvie (when are you coming to UM for a seminar?) and my wonderful (she really is) mother-in-law!My deep thought for the day: life goes by quickly, so pay attenti...
Purdue looked like the worst team Michigan has played all year, which surprised me, and made for a pretty boring game. Still, Michigan can use the win and it was a chance for the players to get out some of their frustrations from the losses against Alabama and Notre Dame.I spent a lot of time watching the much more exciting Stanford-Arizona game.Next week: likely another blowout, this time against Illinois 3:30 on A...
This is something that has puzzled me since grade school days: can there be anything less appropriate in the land of the free than to press children to engage in ritual toadying to the state every day?Shame on you, Rick Snyder. This was a missed opportunity for some leadership and a very teachable mome...
If two grocery store chains were planning to merge and rented a couple of state legislators to introduce a bill that would prevent the opening of new grocery stores in their areas while they completed their merger, people would either laugh or scream or both.Why isn't the reaction the same when it is two public school distric...
Friday, October 5, 2012
The Daily Mail (of course) has the shocking story of the blue team state senate candidate in Maine who spends her free time as a "level 85 orc assassin rogue" on World of Warcraft.Maybe I'm different (okay, for sure I am) but to me this means 10,000 bonus points for Ms. Lachowicz.Hat tip - it almost goes without saying - Charlie Br...
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Monday, October 1, 2012
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Sunday, September 23, 2012
The Michigan defense played quite well, but not well enough to cancel out a really, really (really, really) sloppy game by the offense. Live by Denard, die by Denard, it seems.This will likely drop Michigan out of the top 25. The good news is that much of the rest of the Big Ten continues to play poorly (e.g. Iowa losing to Central Michigan and Illinois getting routed by Louisiana Tech), so bowl eligibility should not be a problem.annarbor.com coverage he...
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Friday, September 21, 2012
1. A nice piece from the NYT Economix blog on the voting habits of those who do not pay income tax.2. Matt Welch at reason does some debunking.3. Nick Gillespie at reason on the good news: both campaigns and the media who love them can avoid talking about anything serious for a few more days.4. A good political overview from the Economist.I await the happy day when the election is over and we can return to the usual, marginally lower, level of inanity.Addendum: Matt Welch link fixed. And a very nice piece from Steve Chapm...
Only a few hours left to help Uncle Bonsai - my favorite folk group - out with their children's book / CD project on Kickstarter.I will confess that I am distracted both by the idea of a personal concert - $3,000 is much less than I imagined such a thing would cost - and by the idea of getting a personal recording of a song of my choice for only $500. There are a few UB songs that I recall fondly from my college days that they have never, to my knowledge, recorded. One is "Visible Panty Lines", which they would perform with some...
Thursday, September 20, 2012
As one expects, this Malcolm Gladwell piece on child molesters is well-written and interesting and informed by the literature.What I think is missing is any notion that Type II errors have to be balanced against Type I errors. Gladwell is all about Type I errors - failing to conclude that individuals are child molesters when they actually are - and not at all about Type II errors - falsely concluding that individuals are child molesters when in fact they are not. Both types of error are very costly in this conte...
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
In the world of survey sampling, PSU stands for "primary sampling unit". In the world of college football victories for pay, it apparently stands for "portland state university".The main take-away is that the defense really is a lot better than last year. That's good news.Seattle Times coverage here.Next comes the not so happy part of Washington's schedule: Stanford on Thursday, Sept. 27, then Oregon, then USC. U...
I felt a bit old while watching this game when I realized that my youthful enthusiasm for blowouts in favor of my preferred team is fading away. I can remember having a discussion with my father about this when I was about 12 in which I argued in favor of blowouts and he argued in favor of close wins. I have now come over to his position.Annarbor.com coverage of the one-sided affair is he...
Mother Jones feigns shock at the "secret" video of remarks by Romney at a campaign fundraiser. I the only one who finds it obvious that this was deliberately released by the Romney campaign?What one might call the moral hazard problem (or perhaps the mass corruption problem) of people voting themselves treats at the expense of others is hardly new, and Romney both overstates it as it applies to the poor and is too narrow about it as it applies to the middle class. It is also hardly limited to the blue team. For example, all those folks who...
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Via the Atlantic, a short compilation of political attack ads starting in the 1950s.Even if you already know that attack ads are nothing new, the compilation is interesting because it shows how the technology of television has improved over time, it shows that people in the past often thought differently about particular candidates than we do now, and because it illustrates other historical changes. As an example of the last of these, can you imagine a blue team candidate using the term "God's children" without irony, as Lyndon Johnson does in...
Friday, September 14, 2012
Thursday, September 13, 2012
What a fascinating documentary! Originally intended to be the story of the building of the largest private home ("Versailles") in the US, the financial crisis turned it into a much more interesting story when it came along and upset the process.The NYT offers both a review by A.O. Scott - a bit more positive than I would be - and another, perhaps even more interesting, piece on the post-movie lawsuit by David Siegel, the patriarch of the family building the house and the boss of the world's largest privately held time-share company.And it was extra...
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
This is what one would watch on a highbrow, French version of the Lifetime channel, if there was such a thing. A.O. Scott walks the thin line between "pretty nice" and "wow, I've seen all those cliches before", which is exactly where to walk with this movie.Recommended as being very good conditional on gen...
Monday, September 10, 2012
From the Journal of Political Economy to insulting everyone who suffered under communism by equating them with the people who celebrated "Chik-fil-A Appreciation Day".An indefensible waste of human capital, I would say, though I suspect Dr. Roback would disagree.Hat tip on the Chik-fil-A piece: Mel Steph...
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Michigan was lucky to get out of this one with a win. The annarbor.com article makes lots of excuses, but the fact of the matter is that the team was over-rated at the start of the season. Hopefully last week's debacle at Alabama and this week's squeaker at home will put an end to the media hype and get the team focused on working hard to get better.The most interesting bit is perhaps the adjustment to the defense that involved putting in a freshman who had been on an option team in high school and so was experienced at defending it. The...
To be honest, this is about what I expected. LSU was in the national championship game last year for a reason and the Huskies were playing them on their field. Not a good recipe for success, especially not in the second week of the season with a young team.My views about the likely outcome for the season, somewhere between six and nine wins, have not really changed. If anything, the defense played a bit better than I expected against LSU, particularly given that they were on the field most of the game due to Washington's offensive woes. If this...
Saturday, September 8, 2012
I spent yesterday morning taking part in a panel on US active labor market programs put on by the American Enterprise Institute in DC. This is the first time I have ever done a sort of think tank policy "event" - all the AEI folks called it the "event" - in my career. It was more fun than I expected.You can watch videos of the event at the AEI web page and on the C-Span (another first for me) web page. AEI excerpted my comments comparing the cost information available at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor, where I worked in high school, with...
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Washington's first game of the season was a lot closer than it should have been. That's the bad news. The good news is that the defense looked much improved from last year.Seattle Times story here.Next week: LSU in Baton Rouge. Ugh. I am unsure of the point of putting LSU on the schedule.The other bad news is that Comcast is not carrying the Pac-12 network in Ann Arbor, as well as many other places. Given that they provide hundreds of channels of worthless drivel, this seems an odd choice, particularly given the long-standing rivalry between the...
Reason's interviewer demonstrates what you really already knew: (1) most people hold large numbers of mutually inconsistent political views and (2) that is even true of people at a political convention whom you might have thought would have devoted more CPU cycles to trying to be consistent. Being pro-choice only in cases where you might actually make the choice but not in other cases is a bit like wanting free speech only for people who agree with you (and there are many on both teams who hold essentially that position). It truly is amazing that...
Monday, September 3, 2012
1. Some bits and photos on the history of course registration at Michigan. I always loved picking courses - so many cool choices, but tempered with the frustration at not being able to take all the ones that sounded interesting. Sort of like seminars and conferences, I suppose.2. Size matters at the Fed's Jackson Hole symposium.3. Where the college students are - from Atlantic Cities.4. Organizing the school day morning. This is new for us - tomorrow is Elizabeth's first day of kindergarten.5. Interview with Maggie Gyllenhall on Sal...
The starting paragraphs of Katie's fine essay:If, from beyond the grave, Betty Friedan were to review the Facebook habits of the over-30 set, I am afraid she would be very disappointed in us. By this I mean specifically the trend of women using photographs of their children instead of themselves as the main picture on their Facebook profiles. You click on a friend’s name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted toddler running on the beach. Here, harmlessly embedded in one of...
Monday, August 27, 2012
Bob Lalonde reviews the recent Upjohn book, edited by Doug Besharov and Phoebe Cottingham, on the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) (journal access required). The book grew out of a mini-conference held to inform the Europeans of the lessons they could learn from the US experience with active labor market programs.The review has wise words about the difficulties of non-experimental evaluation of active labor market programs like WIA, about the lack of policy response to evaluation results, and about performance management. I particularly...
ParaNorman is a fine bit of fluff with some good humor - I quite enjoyed Courtney, the airhead older sister - and a nice message - be nice to people who are different - though not one that is subtly delivered. As the NYT reviewer notes, the animation is beautiful and fun as well.Recommended if you have ki...
The Daily Mail reports that it is a big week for "Lisa Ann", the "adult entertainer" who looks like Sarah Palin.Contra Lisa Ann, it is not clear to me that voting for someone because they are hot is worse than voting for them because they promise to take things from other people and give them to you. Hat tip: Charlie Brown[Text updated to reflect the fact that the FT and the Daily Mail are not the sa...
Sunday, August 26, 2012
The FT surveys the growth of corporate wellness programs that include aspects of "mindfulness", pop Buddhism, yoga and other spiritual tricks for daily living.I am sympathetic to the idea that periods of quiet and reflection can improve one's life, but the supposed "scientific" evidence cited in the article is pretty miserable.The first bit consists of participant evaluations:The company has even begun research into its efficacy, and the early results are striking. After one of Marturano’s seven-week courses, 83 per cent of participants said they...
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