Christina Lienen: When Strasbourg Won’t Have It – Push for or Limitation of Common Law Constitutional Rights?
10 Jan 2017 1 Comment
in economics
2016: In Memoriam
10 Jan 2017 Leave a comment
It is a sad truth that our time to shine is relatively brief. We are only vital and gorgeous for a short time and then we become more “ordinary” year by year. Of course, in truth, we are really NOT more ordinary. We are still who we were. But, Madonna twerking at 60 is not the same as Madonna twerking at 25. Society worships youth and insists on pushing us toward an irrelevant existence as we get older. We are marginalized simply because we’ve dared to age. David Bowie was once the most cutting edge performer on the planet. He pushed the envelope on music, fashion and stage performance. At the time of his death, he quietly worked on his final album, far away from the spotlight, while dealing with the agony of liver cancer. At 69, he was no longer in the spotlight, but was David Bowie any less…
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PEOPLE ARE AWESOME 2016 | BEST VIDEOS OF THE YEAR!
10 Jan 2017 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture
From physicists to engineers to meds to plumbers: Esther Duflo rediscovering the lost art of economics @ASSA2017
10 Jan 2017 Leave a comment
in economics
“The economist as plumber”
Yesterday, Esther Duflo gave the American Economic Association Richard T. Ely lecture (edit: the full video of the lecture is now online). The gist of her talk was that economists should think as themselves more as plumbers who lay the pipes and fix the leaks. Economists should not merely be concerned with what policy to implement she argued, but to work out the details and practicalities of such implementation. She gave a lot of examples seemingly related to institutional design (though not through mechanisms). For instance, she showed that the transparency, thus efficiency, of a rice subsidy program could be improved by providing ID card to eligible family. But how authorities provide the cards matter, she pointed out. Likewise, not just how many government workers you hire and how much you pay them is important. How you recruit them, that is what you…
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Thinking of rent control?
10 Jan 2017 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, economics of natural disasters, economics of regulation, Milton Friedman Tags: george stigler, rent control
Exoplanet anniversary: 1st alien worlds confirmed 25 years ago today
10 Jan 2017 Leave a comment
in economics
![Still from pulsar animation. [Image credit: NASA]](https://utopiayouarestandinginit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/pulsar.jpg)
Still from pulsar animation. [Image credit: NASA]
The exoplanet revolution began 25 years ago today. On Jan. 9, 1992, astronomers Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail published a paper in the journal Nature announcing the discovery of two planets circling an incredibly dense, rapidly rotating stellar corpse known as a pulsar.
It was a landmark find: while several alien-world “candidates” had recently been spotted, Wolszczan and Frail provided the first confirmation that planets exist beyond our own solar system, reports Mike Wall.
“From the very start, the existence of such a system carried with it a prediction that planets around other stars must be common, and that they may exist in a wide variety of architectures, which would be impossible to anticipate on the basis of our knowledge of the solar system alone,” Wolszczan, who’s based at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in a note about the pulsar planets for the…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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