David Hume was born three hundred years ago, in 1711. The world has changed radically since his time, and yet many of his ideas and admoni...

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has shown that if conditional probabilities are reinterpreted as frequencies, people have no problem in i...

post hoc, ergo propter hoc (not)

... A lot of success stories we hear are despite the system, not because of it, and the sooner we recognize that, the better the chances th...

Tyler Cowen at MR , linking here : Coffee shops around the world have employed loyalty card schemes for many years, but now we’ve come acro...

Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontussen (PDF) have a piece on the relationship between inequality and distribution in the new American Political Scie...

There is much more of interest here . I would describe this as a major, still uninternalized lesson of the recent crisis, with its roller c...

Courtesy MR, Keith Hennessey on The Roles of the President's White House economic advisors . Tyler Cowen is right to say: to excerpt wo...

Last Call

Cowen on Last Call: Okrent can't claim to have discovered Prohibition; Michael Lerner's recent Dry Manhattan is another good entr...

If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like? That's from Hudson Collins, loyal MR ...

10

What quickly became notable, however, was the scarcity of fiction. To a degree, this was determined by Cowen’s original list, but as the sub...

desperately seeking ideal speech situation

Sorry for not following anyone. I'm still trying to lear how to use this tool. JH Yes, that JH is Jürgen Habermas . From the indispens...

codes of the underworld

The signaling problems faced by criminals are unusual in the following regard. On one hand they wish to signal a certain untrustworthiness,...

you don't need a diploma, you need a work ethic

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution on education and signaling, here If education is pure signaling, just give everyone a standardized test i...

who will buy

Andrew Sullivan pointed out that it is legal to pay two people to have sex and film them and sell the film; it just isn't legal to pay ...

any fan of Dr Seuss...

Kevin Drum wonders why Clinton and Obama supporters get so worked up at each other. Any fan of Dr. Seuss will know that policy similarity h...

marginal utility

I had a bad habit. I would get up, check e-mails; next thing I knew, several hours of surfing would have gone by. As 2007 wound down, I work...