Contrivances
Consider traditional images [in country music]. Say you’re watching a music video of a good ole boy all dressed up in a cowboy hat, boots, and jeans, sitting on the front porch, strumming his guitar...
View ArticleA Parasitic City, In Love With Itself
Video: Mark Leibovich discusses This Town[Washington, DC] has also always enjoyed pockets of wealth, usually of the old-money variety: bankers, railroad barons, and aristocrats from other parts of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Undefeated: Stern Virtues and the Power of Belief
“Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” says former NFL coach Tony Dungy in The Power of Habit. “They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react....
View ArticleIs Slow Growth the New Normal?
Video: Cato Institute event on the future of economic growth.Event summary:The sluggish recovery from the Great Recession raises a troubling question: is this the new normal? Tyler Cowen launched an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Land That Is California
Top Row, from left: Laguna Beach; Joshua Tree National Park; Thousand Palms Oasis near Indio. Bottom: Lake Tahoe.On a clear day, photographed from a satellite, California appears as a serene palette of...
View ArticleA Most Unsettling Film: The Donner Party
The Onion AV Club calls The Donner Party, a 1992 PBS documentary by Ric "Brother of Ken" Burns, one of the most unsettling movies of all time. I remember first seeing the film as a middle school...
View ArticleTyler Cowen's Rules for Dining Out
Video: Tyler Cowen on how to find good eatsTyler Cowen’s Rules for Dining Out:Beware the Beautiful, Laughing WomenGet Out of the City and Into the Strip Mall (Corollary: The food truck is your...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Offbeat Oregon History
Among my new favorite websites is Offbeat Oregon History. Like any place inhabited by humans, Oregon has an abundantly odd history and Offbeat Oregon chronicles it. A sampling of the past happenings in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The People and Languages of Old California
Wow:At the initial moment of European contact in 1492, something approaching one third of all Native Americans living within the present-day boundaries of the continental United States—which is to say,...
View ArticleBootleggers, Baptists, and Korea's Dependence on Internet Explorer
Embedded Video: Bruce Yandle discusses "Bootleggers and Baptists"Despite its reputation as a tech-savvy nation, South Korea is stuck in the past - in the internet Dark Ages of the late 1990s, to be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On Profits and People
Most of us grew up with a view of industry heavily shaped by Karl Marx, Charles Dickens*, and Upton Sinclair. For these writers, factories were “dark satanic mills” (to borrow William Blake’s phrase)...
View ArticleThe NSA IS the State
On Facebook, Aaron Ross Powell of the Cato Institute writes: "The thing about these NSA revelations is they’re not an aberration within the state. They’re the state’s very nature exposed."Within the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Opting Out of Leviathan
In 1970, the economist A.O. Hirschman published Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, in which he argued that citizens of a dysfunctional or oppressive state have two basic options if they wish to improve their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tyler Cowen on Korean Food in "An Economist Gets Lunch"
Writes Tyler Cowen in An Economist Gets Lunch:...most people don’t like Korean food. They like some Korean food, such as the sugary meats of a bul-gogi with rice or the dumplings, which could come from...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Effects of Teen Employment
My wife is a PhD student and her primary research interest these days is the effects of teenage employment on kids' academic development. In a recent round of number-crunching, she found that when kids...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Economic Growth: A Matter of Life and Death
Photo: Caritas/ CAFOD, November 2013From the time it made landfall on the Philippine island of Samar earlier this month supertyphoon Haiyan laid waste to some of the poorest regions of a poor nation....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Trade, Not Aid, Brings Prosperity
In a recent Korea Times op-ed, my friend and former KDI colleague Shomi Kim writes: Korea in 2009 became the 24th member state of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in the Organization for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The "Hee Haw" Hangover
What would rock and country music of the late 20th century have sounded like in the absence of Buck Owens? If Owens is remembered at all today outside of hardcore country circles, it is as that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
DeLorean Redux: The Fisker Karma
The details are all too familiar: a world-class car designer convinces a government that he can build The Car of the Future, receives millions of dollars in taxpayer money, and then watches as the...
View ArticleAmazon's Drones and Tyler Cowen's Non-Average Future
Embedded Video: Amazon drones to deliver packages within thirty minutes.I just today got my hands on a copy of Tyler Cowen's latest book, Average is Over. As it happens, I also watched the above video...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Departures 2013: J.J. Cale
Embedded Video: J.J. Cale, "After Midnight" (1971, with Leon Russell)Other than perhaps the early Allman Brothers, no one has better, or more effortlessly, blended rock, country, blues, and jazz music...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In a Crisis, Companies Must Serve, While Governments Can Command
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told a conference of chief executives in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, soon after he was appointed as President Obama’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I'll Drink to That: Today is the 80th Anniversary of the End of Prohibition
Repeal Day is a holiday worth celebrating. Fortunately, it's also among the easiest and most enjoyable to celebrate. All you have to do is head down to your local bar or liquor store and buy yourself a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Departures 2013: Bobby "Blue" Bland
Bobby [Bland] zeroed in on the concussive sound of larger souls meeting larger cages. It is a vocal ejaculation, equally visceral and ethereal, both more and less than human. It is a common punctuation...
View ArticleAgainst Bad Environmentalism
The description of last week's episode of Freakonomics pretty much says it all: "Being green is rarely a black-and-white issue - but that doesn't stop marketers and politicians from pretending it is."...
View Article
