Some Links, Including the Benefits of Holding "it" In

We make better long-run decisions on a full bladder. I can't wait to share this with my 75-minute classes. (APS)
Wage gaps and education. Some of this seems contrary to the recent evidence of stagnating education wage premia. (Krugman and Cowen - separately, of course!)
Given these structural changes, structural change is not welfare-neutral, even in the long run. (Rodrik)
Even (especially?) informed voters just really don't have beliefs about politics and policy that are consistent with reality. (Caplan)
Is controlled immigration better for welfare programs? This seems to assume a lot about the effectiveness of the controls.  (VOX)

Wage Struggles of Men (and a Link on Helping the Homeless)

Wage struggles of men? (Economix) Forgive me for being cynical, but looking at earnings per capita instead of earnings per worker and concluding that there is some sort of tide against men in the labor market seems hypocritical and sexist. A paper on the gender gap scarcely gets published unless it looks at female earnings on a per worker and per hour basis. This, of course is because many say there is "voluntary" selection into (and more importantly out of) the work force. How concerned should we be if more men are beginning to voluntarily select out of the work force (or begin working fewer hours), as more of their wives work full time? For thirty years women were told that their hours-worked choices were "voluntary" and the bar for showing evidence of a culture of discrimination was set almost impossibly high. Now that things are changing, why are we so quick to feel sorry for the men?

Direct transfers are often better than paternalistic in-kind ones (Jason Kottke)

An Interesting Take

I hadn't seen much relation of the Wisconsin protests with international trade, but here's an interesting point from the international economic law and policy blog.

The right to collective bargaining is one of the so-called "core labor rights" that the U.S. uses for GSP conditionality, and the 2002 TPA required labor rights to be a negotiating objective in U.S. PTAs.  ...  Article 6 of the US-Jordan FTA, for example, ... requires that each party "strive" to ensure that its laws incorporate freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.

Will this make us hypocrites? I guess not if you consider the fact that we probably already are, but it won't help.

Links on Arguing for Free Trade and Other Stuff

A simplistic argument for free trade by NG Mankiw; a simplistic response from Uwe Reinhardt; a better response here and here.
The other stuff. Can't resist a few links on the union stuff.
Matt Yglesias on Swedish labor unions:

Swedish labor unions could use their dominant labor market position to increase workers’ compensation by making Swedish firms less profitable than non-Swedish ones, but that would be bad for everyone. What you get instead is a kind of Mirror Universe version of the Chamber of Commerce, a politically powerful institution interested in maximizing the income growth of the median Swede rather than the median Swedish CEO.

This only works because a really high percentage of workers in Nordic countries is unionized.
Menzie Chinn on the fiscal non-problems in Wisconsin.
Finally, Chinn on, well, let's say buyers' remorse:

"I am going to make an effort to speak for myself, and every member of the Wisconsin State Patrol when I say this ... I specifically regret the endorsement of the Wisconsin Trooper's Association for Gov. Scott Walker. I regret the governor's decision to 'endorse' the troopers and inspectors of the Wisconsin State Patrol."

That's Chinn quoting Tracy Fuller, president of the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Association. To this I say, "Really?" I mean they guy campaigned against public sector unions when you supported him. Then again, I can understand a little surprise at a politician who does what he says he'll do.
In other news, it seems as if the governor is testing the water for having the National Guard take over for the bastard union prison guards (at what cost I wonder?).

Two Links on Pay Gaps

Seems the gender wage gap varies a lot by industry. Kind of mirrors some results in a working paper by Bang and Basu, 2010 (not Atin). If only the jerks fine and distinguished peers who review for journals would publish it. (Economix)

Public vs. private pay gap: it's not what you think, union-haters. (Econbrowser)

Lazy Academics

Hamermesh has a post out on Freakonomics saying that he's paying the price of other professors' laziness at his own institution. My colleagues and I at VMI are paying the price for the laziness of professors at other institutions. VMI credibly fights grade inflation; many schools don't. It affects teaching evaluations.

Student in my class: Why are tests here at VMI so hard?
Me: What do you mean?
Student: My friend at (an institution about an hour north of VMI) took (a class in the business school) and her tests were 25 easy multiple choice questions and that's it. They get an easy A while we have to work for B's and C'sWhy is that?
Me: There are probably two reasons: First, there is a lot of grade inflation at other schools, which is very closely tied to whether professors get tenure. Second, the teachers there probably lazy - the cheapest way to get better teaching evaluations is to make the course easy and thus give higher grades.
Student: I wish VMI did that, too.
Me: No, you don't. In fact, you came to VMI knowing that it was a tougher place, and you made that choice anyway. If you want easy A's there are plenty of schools where you can get easy A's. Why didn't you go there instead?
Other Student: Because I don't want to get a shitty job.

There you go. Even students nearing final exams can get why grade inflation is bad, you just have to work them through the logic. Too bad incentives are so skewed the other direction.

Big Government

From the Economist:

This means that the economy has been creating private jobs at an above-trend rate for three months now, but the total has been held back by government; besides shrinking census employment, local government payrolls shrank in October.

In other words, government employment (partly due to the laying-off of census workers and partly due to stingy state and local governments) is SHRINKING as opposed to growing, as certain political narratives would have us believe.

Structural Change

Leaving the unemployment and housing crash that is Las Vegas, measured by one-way U-Haul prices.

Big, bad government

If the government's intrusiveness in the real economy can be at all proxied by public sector employment, then the Tea Party should take note of what's happened in the last two years.

Graph of the day

Is it any wonder middle class folks have so much displaced anger?

Some Links, Featuring Tourette's, Dilbert, and a Baseball Mystery

Advantages to Tourette's (British Psychological Society HT: TC @ MR)?
Dilbert, "cheaper" copies, and teaching managers about opportunity cost (Freakonomics).
Why are there so many power-hitting middle infielders these days (Economix)?
A couple of links on "cap and trade" vs. the carbon tax (Economix and Economist)
Libertarianism explained: a review of Jeffrey Miron's "Libertarianism, from A to Z." (Economix). Here is an interesting excerpt:

Professor Miron writes that “antipoverty spending is the most defensible kind of redistribution,” because “the goal of this redistribution – helping the poor – is reasonable and the costs of a well-designed limited antipoverty program (e.g., a negative income tax set on a state-by-state basis) are modest.”

Another interesting quotation on libertarianism (From Raj Pate's "The Value of Nothing"; HT to Atin Basu and Greg Lippiatt):

"There are two novels that can transform a 14 year old kid's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shurgged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."  

Some links, with tragedy of the commons in Zimbabwe

A good picture of the tragedy of the commons - the reason Elinor Ostrom shared the economics Nobel last year.
The Harvard undergraduate thesis everyone's talking about.
Does taking the first, possibly temporary, job in a crisis hurt future EP?