For Mancow, Being on Olberman only Seemed like Torture

Mancow (the self-named conservative/libertarian shock jock, not Mankiw, who I sometimes poke fun at as "Mancow") wanted to show that waterboarding wasn't so bad, so he had a a marine do it to him. He lasted 5 seconds. He had actually nearly drowned once in childhood, and said that waterboarding is worse than drowning. Needless to say, he's converted. See his interview on Countdown here:

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Socialism, Fascism, and other Meaningless Words

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Incentives, Wet Diapers, and the Financial Crisis

Be careful how you design incentives.

New blog to watch

Here's a new one for watching - for me it will be more and more useful beginning about 08-27-2009 (plus or minus random error).

Nice Non-technical Discussion of the "Resource Curse"

Three reasons resources are more curse than blessing. Part of the third, which she leaves out, is that the rent seeking behavior, paired with poor governance and the boom-bust volatility in the second, can often mean armed conflict.

Mancow Back on Track (for Now)

Greg Mankiw has started taking a fair, levelheaded assessment of things again. I'm glad to see it and hope it continues without reverting to being a full-time puppet of the Republicanist Party.

Google

This was interesting. Google may be getting a little out of hand. On the other hand, if you just want information about something, this is an interesting new question-answering tool from Wolfram.

Why do Southern States have a Low HDI?

This was an interesting post on Andrew Gelman's stats blog. Basically, it talks about a new way of thinking about "human development" in the US by state, and compares it to an old way - the inverse of the distance to the Canadian border. What's about as interesting was this comment to a Catherine Campbell post at Economix:

Tom Friedman has often observed that poorly educated, unemployed youth in
Arab countries turned to fundamentalism. He blames the inefficient kleptocracies
that run these countries for these backward attitudes.
Is something like this
happening in the solid Republican states?

Hmmm.