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May 28, 2024 | 
econlib.org | David Henderson |Kevin Corcoran |Tarnell Brown
I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last week and turned on Turner Movie Classics (TCM). Playing at the time was the 1954 movie Brigadoon. I’d heard about it but never seen it. It’s about 2 guys on a hunting trip to Scotland who discover a place in mid-18th century Scotland in which people live as if it’s the mid-18th century. But it exists in the mid 20th century. One of the characters, played by Gene Kelly, falls in love with one of the residents of the town, Brigadoon.
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May 28, 2024 | 
econlib.org | Kevin Corcoran |Tarnell Brown |Scott Sumner
Here’s a hot shopping tip that I suspect most readers won’t be able to take advantage of – at the moment, Apple is discounting the iPhone in China. But I don’t bring that up because I’m actually hoping to influence anyone’s shopping behavior. I find it noteworthy for other reasons. It may seem odd that I’d find it noteworthy that a company was offering a discount on one of their products. Isn’t that something companies do all the time? Not in Apple’s case.
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May 27, 2024 | 
econlib.org | Tarnell Brown |Scott Sumner |David Henderson
Consequences of the War on Drugs™ AbroadIn 1996, Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control Chuck Grassley testified that a recent poll revealed that eighty percent of Americans viewed as their primary foreign policy concern the stopping of illegal drugs being trafficked into the United States.
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May 24, 2024 | 
econlib.org | Walter Edward Block |Kevin Corcoran |Tarnell Brown
Who’d have thunk it? Physicians have actually transferred a kidney from a pig to a human being, and the operation appears to have been a success (not for the pig; for the person!). The patient was helped by this transplant and her body did not reject the kidney she received as was initially feared.
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May 23, 2024 | 
econlib.org | Kevin Corcoran |Tarnell Brown |David Henderson
Recently, Tucker Carlson has committed the all-too-common mistake of suggesting that evolution by natural selection is an unproven idea, because evolution is merely a “theory.” As he put it on Joe Rogan’s podcast, “Darwin’s theory’s totally unproven – that’s why it’s still a theory, almost two hundred years later.” This is an elementary misunderstanding of what “theory” means in a scientific sense.
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May 23, 2024 | 
econlib.org | Tarnell Brown |David Henderson
In her book The New Jim Crow (Alexander, 2010 ), Michelle Alexander makes the claim that while overt discrimination based on race is no longer socially acceptable, discrimination against those convicted of a crime is. She notes that while crime rates in America are roughly equal with those of other Western nations, incarceration rates have consistently soared, despite those domestic crime rates being below the international average.
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May 16, 2024 | 
econlib.org | Scott Sumner |Tarnell Brown |David Henderson
Some people on the right worry that immigration will cause America’s white population to be largely replaced by non-whites. This hypothesis is sometimes referred to as “The Great Replacement”. There is a great replacement occurring, but these worriers have things exactly backwards. (As an aside, this post will not examine the pros and cons of a changing ethnic mix.
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May 16, 2024 | 
econlib.org | Tarnell Brown |David Henderson |Art Carden
This is the fourth in my series on the social costs of drug prohibition. You can read part one here (prison-industrial complex), part two (police militarization) here, and part three (civil asset forfeiture). Prohibition policies are often sold to a willing public on the grounds of crime reduction. This is especially true regarding the rhetoric on violent crime, as public policy has long assumed a causal relationship between drug use and an increase in violent crime.
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May 8, 2024 | 
econlib.org | Kevin Corcoran |Scott Sumner |Tarnell Brown
Michael Crichton once highlighted an unusual quirk in human thinking – something he called Gell-Mann Amnesia, after his friend Murray Gell-Mann. Chrichton said:Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.
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May 8, 2024 | 
econlib.org | Scott Sumner |Tarnell Brown
In a recent blog post, Vasant Dhar had some interesting remarks about the possible role of AI in Fed policy:
Might AI help us better understand the data and design better economic policy interventions? Last week I had lunch with some central bankers who wanted to talk to me about AI. They were interested in discussing how they should think about the risks and opportunities associated with the increasing presence of AI in financial markets.
