Inactionable

If you’re not one of the privileged few to have eaten at elBulli, looks like you’re out of luck. Ferran Adria has decided to close the world’s most prestigious restaurant in order to start a culinary academy. Read more…

What does this say about our society that this is necessary?  It brings to light the fact that we are a rule-based, not a principle-based society.

You’re right. We are absolutely a rule-based society. The question is why, and are we better off for it?

I think that it’s a natural human tendency to create rules, even if strong principles exist. There are some actions that are so clearly unacceptable to a society that there’s no reason not to codify them. Don’t kill people, for example. It certainly fits under my common sense umbrella, but common sense varies and we don’t want ambiguity on this issue. So we make a rule. Read more…

In the Concise Guide to Macro Economics, David Moss points out that, along with output and money, expectations are a key driver of economic activity. While governments have been explicitly managing production and money supply for centuries, Keynes was really the first guy to dive deeply into how governments could “cultivate favorable expectations.” By spending to a deficit in a contracting economy, a government could replace private demand, but more importantly, it could send a signal to the private sector that things were getting better. As with nearly all economic policies, its efficacy is debatable, but deficit spending is certainly the favored prescription of the Bush and Obama economic teams. Read more…

Thank you, Luke, for the excuse to take a break from cover letters! I’m appalled by Sowell’s piece. I’d be amused by a Stanford Hoover fellow with Harvard degree and a Chicago Economics Ph.D spewing anti-intellectualism if that sort of stuff didn’t tend to get violent and oppressive. Read about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Stalin in the USSR or the Islamic Revolution in Iran if you want to know how quickly anti-intellectualism can get out of hand. Here are a few criticisms – I promise to avoid the too-easy ad hominem ones and let Sowell’s alarming hypocrisy slide from here on. Read more…

Welcome to a five-part (or so) series of posts! I was really excited to see A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics on our J-Term reading list. As you can probably already tell from the blog, this is the part of our coursework that I care the most about. I read the book on a long flight and have more than a few things to say.

My quick impression: this is a fantastic macro book. For better or worse (I’ll say better, given the title), it is incredibly concise. I think Moss hits on the important big ideas (output, money, inflation, expectations) and includes a healthy dose of skepticism in our ability to apply those ideas successfully. There is no more important passage than the one at the end of the book: Read more…

Humanity owes its quality of living to specialization. The idea is incredibly simple: whoever does a task best can do that task for more than just himself. The best shoemaker in town can make shoes for everyone. The best strawberry grower can grow everyone’s strawberries. If everyone in the town specializes in the task where they enjoy a comparative advantage, the town can do better with the same resources. Think about what your life would look like without specialization and trade … you’d be wearing whatever clothes you could create with your own hands. You’d be living under the best roof you were able to build. You’d be eating whatever you grew, gathered or killed. I know that sounds romantic to some people, but I’ll pass. Read more…

Saludos desde Barcelona! I just read Telling Lies on Luke’s recommendation and thought I’d share my thoughts. Paul Ekman has devoted a tremendous amount of research to defining and categorizing the physical and behavioral clues that can accompany deceit. His book is an exhaustive list of proper research, observations and untested hypotheses. It’s longer than it needs to be, but it’s definitely interesting reading. Read more…

I’ve never been too thrilled that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exist. To me, those government-sponsored enterprises exemplify all that is bad about public-private partnerships. Both are private, in the sense that they can record profits and distribute dividends to their private shareholders. They’re public in the sense that they have an implicit (and, since September 2008, an explicit) government backstop should they lose money. This is the worst sort of privatization – the profits are privatized and the losses are socialized. Only the most politically privileged among us can work out a deal like this! Read more…

Luke is pretty much my nemesis in any mafia game – whereas I’ve been pretty successful in the role of mafia, he’s scary good as a cop. Those roles require very different skills. While cops and mafia are both trying to “stay hidden,” the latter need to be a lot more deceitful about it. Don’t ask what it says about me that I’m good at this … but here are my tips and tricks:

In the first couple rounds of the game, nobody who is nominated has a coherent defense, and chances are pretty good that nobody was nominated for any meaningful reason. Your goal as mafia is just to dodge stray bullets. If one of your mafia teammates gets put on the voting block, it’s dangerous to protect them through verbal argument, but you can certainly protect them by nominating two or three other people. Diversify! Read more…

I’ve heard more than a few politicians and pundits say something along the lines of “We don’t need to change our health care system, people from all over come to the US for the best care in the world!” No matter where you fall politically, let’s just point out a logical fallacy when we see one. The quality of care at the top end is nobody’s concern. The concern is accessibility – expanding access (while controlling costs) is the point of the health care policy debate. Whether you think a private or public system can achieve this better, the “best in the world” argument is not relevant. The closest equivalent that I can come up with: If the US shut down every elementary school, high school and university in the country but kept the Ivy League in place, would the US education system be the best in the world? People from all over would still come!