Ground control to Major Tom

More pictures of the boys' room, but this time it's the final product. The planets hanging from the ceiling begin with the sun in one corner, and end with Pluto in the corner above Oliver's bed. Also note the space ship hanging above each boy's bed. If you look closely at ODB's ship, you'll notice that he's manning the controls in his buzz lightyear outfit. It's all Steph's doing. Pretty nifty, huh?

April 05 Journal of Law and Economics

The April 05 JLE is out. It was published last week. One article in the journal is a clear standout.

The remaining articles, however, look pretty interesting too. For instance, the paper by Nobel prize winner James Heckman, et al. looks to be quite provocative. It seeks to explain between-race wage differences using novel empirical methods. Marginal Revolution offers a nice summary of the paper. There is also another paper in the journal by Tabarrok, et al. that, as does my article, applies a natural experiment approach. In their case, they use the increase in police presence in Washington DC, brought about by the increases in the terror alert levels, to explain the effect of police presence on crime. Again, Marginal Revolution offers a succinct summary of the paper.

Jail or Packer tickets?

Poverty is indeed a relative term. Case in point:

Sharon E. Rosenthal, 59, of Appleton will decide whether to donate her family's Packer tickets for the next season to charity or serve 90 days in jail as part of her sentence for one felony count of theft.

The judge imposed this novel sentence in order to accomdate Ms. Rosenthal's limited means.

While Rosenthal told police financial hardship was an issue, she and her husband managed to maintain the cost of four tickets to the Packers’ three-game season package.

Link

Arizona Vacation

Steph and I returned this evening from an extended weekend in Arizona. Stephanie's sister, Monica, watched the boys. Thanks Monica!! We stayed with friends - Karyn, Franco and Sofia Ricci - who reside in Chandler, AZ (which is just outside of Phoenix). Karyn, et al. are amazing fun. We dined out, swam in their pool, and admired their incredibly cute one-year old girl, Sofia. On Sunday, Steph and I drove up to Sedona for the day, and on the way up stopped for lunch in a tiny town, perched on the mountain side, named Jerome. It was one of the best, most relaxing vacations we've taken in some time. The pictures below are from Sedona.

Sig Heil to the new pope, Benedict XVI

You all know my views on religion, so I won't go there. But check out Benny's crazy teen-years:

Ratzinger's past includes brief membership of the Hitler Youth movement and wartime service with a German army anti- aircraft unit. (...) Ratzinger was enrolled in an anti-aircraft unit that protected a BMW factory making aircraft engines. The workforce included slaves from Dachau concentration camp. Ratzinger has insisted he never took part in combat or fired a shot — adding that his gun was not even loaded — because of a badly infected finger. He was sent to Hungary, where he set up tank traps and saw Jews being herded to death camps.

What a card, that Benedict. Link

Macher Matisyahu - Hasidic Reggae Star

You can't make this stuff up. Excerpt:

Halfway through the first song, the crowd — which included Jewish kids, Birkenstock-type music fanatics and black faces — was jumping up and down to the beat with Matisyahu, who held his hand to his head so his yarmulke wouldn't fall off.

Oh yeeeah, you go boytchik! Link

Steven Levitt in Slate

Levitt does battle against Steve Sailer in a week long exchange in Slate. Here is the link to Levitt's initial salvo on Monday.

What I most enjoy about the exchange is the way Levitt contemplates Sailer's critique and then dissects its.

Your hypothesis that crack, not abortion, is the story, provides a testable alternative to our explanation of the facts.

He then proceeds to define a testable hypothesis and, no surprise, rejects it.

Crack clearly has affected crime over the last decade, but it cannot explain away our results with respect to legalized abortion.

If you have the patience to digest the details of the exchange, it is revealing. Levitt's approach epitomizes how economists are trained to approach a problem.

Add Levitt to my list of people I think are really neat. Previous honorees include the one and only Xeni Jardin and the unquenchable Michiko Kakutani. Time to go saw some logs.

Google Sightseeing

Google Maps has come out with satellite images. Some clever gent has started a blog, called "Google Sightseeing", that posts interesting satellite images.

This one is my favorite.

You cannot deny the power of economics

A fascinating story in the NYT about competition and the benefits of free markets. Link

Sam practicing his art

A moment worth memorializing, wouldn't you say? In this and the pictures that follow, note that neither Sam nor ODB are wearing any clothes, save their grundys. The fact that the blinds are open doesn't seem to faze them. I'm not sure how this tradition started, but it is now standard practice.



Its been a good three months and Sam still insists that when he grows up he wants to be a rock star. Thanks to Aunt Colleen, for his bday he got a cheapo (and, fortunately, not very loud) mic, electronic keyboard, and electric guitar-shaped device to practice with.

Pics of Sam and ODB's room

Upon popular request, I am posting pics of Sam and Oliver's fancy-dancy room. Steph selected the paint colors, the design, and she painted the murals herself. On one wall you will notice a robot...




And on the other wall there is a rocket ship...




We had painters paint the overall blue-on-top, green-on-the-bottom scheme. I think it turned out well. A final pic of da boys, chillin before bedtime...

Robert Heilbroner, RIP

Dr. Heilbroner passed away back in January of this year. He was 85 years old. I was unaware of his passing until tonight, when I uncovered his obituary in the NYT. This link to the obit should still work.

Digression: In discovering the article, I first discovered a nifty website, The Annotated New York Times, which identifies the most "blogged" articles appearing in the NYT. What is particularly nice about this site is that it lets you search by topic. For instance, the most blogged economics articles appearing in NYT. If you scroll down this list, you'll find the reference to Heilbroner's obit. End of digression.

The article provides a nice summary of his work and the reception among economists to his work. I was not aware that he was shunned by the brotherhood.

Although popular with students and the general reader, he was regarded by mainstream economists as a popularizer and historian whose insights made no great contribution to the study of the field. He, in turn, saw their reliance on mathematics and computer modeling as narrow in vision and as losing sight of the very purpose of economics - to help improve the well-being of people at work and of the society they work in.

I vividly remember reading Heilbroner's "The Worldly Philosophers" in my parents' attic (which was my room for two years after I graduated from Michigan). I was unhappy with my plight as a not-very-good accountant. Or maybe it was the reality of 9-to-5 work that was the real source of my unhappiness. Either way, I was searching for an alibi to go back to school. But how to afford it and what to study? Heilbroner's book, as I recall, was the tipping point. In the course of two months after reading his book, I'd taken my GRE and applied to 10 PhD programs in economics. Was I conned?

Dr. Heilbroner himself was the first to admit that he was not an economists' economist. He preferred writing to plotting the sale of widgets and calculating the effects of a heat wave on corn futures. And he was interested more in the history of economics and in what he considered its true dynamics than in working within the field itself. He liked to say that his chief accomplishment was in conning millions of students into thinking that the field was both interesting and in tune with their social ideas.

Conned or not, I'm glad I read his book.

Man Date

There is a funny article in yesterday's NYT that talks about socializing between straight guys, or as the term is coined in the article the "man date."

Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not.

The article is entertaining in a Sienfeld sort of way, but its a tad deregatory towards men.

The concern about being perceived as gay is one of the major complications of socializing one on one, many straight men acknowledge.

Many straight men? Really? My hunch: thats bullshit. I certainly don't limit my socializing with guys b/c I'm concerned about perception, and I'm far from the pillar of enlightened maleness. The sad truth is I just don't have that many guy friends. And a related fact is that I don't have time to go on such outings. But were I to find the time (and make some friends, of course) I'd still rather go out with a hot chick, like Steph. Link

Pizza Delivery in 15 minutes

This is an interesting application of wireless internet, plus its a pretty ingenious business model. Check it out:

Thirty-minute delivery: the unspoken, but sought-after standard in the pizza business.

Scott Matthew claims his company, Super Fast Pizza, can go from phone call to front porch in half that time.
...
"You hang up the phone, get the kids together, put out the paper plates and we’re parked out front. It blows them away."

So how do they do it?

Using a wireless Internet connection, orders are transmitted to vans in the field, an alarm rings and they’re printed out. The driver — who works solo — goes to the van’s kitchen area, pulls pre-made pizzas on parbaked shells from the cooler and places them in one of five concession-stand-style pizza ovens which cook at 600 F. (The well-secured kitchen equipment runs off onboard generators.) He then returns to the driver’s seat and sets off to the delivery point.

Link