Report from last month about a new documentary . < blockquote dir="ltr"> Bob Compton, an Indianapolis venture-capitalist-turned-filmmaker, has produced a controversial new documentary called "2 Million Minutes" that looks at how American education falls short in today's global economy. "W ... Read more

First two sentences of the abstract for "Finding Peace for Economists in Universities," Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics , 32(3), December 2007: Evidence suggests that economists and agricultural economists have an unusual ability to create anxiety for university upper admini ... Read more

A Canadian customer was calling to find out if there was a faster way to trigger menu commands than mousing up to the menus . Agent: Certainly, sir. There are keyboard shortcuts for many of those commands. For example, suppose you want to trigger the Select All command... Caller: Yes, I u ... Read more

The Door reaches a new low in that ugly but fun emotion, schadenfreude . Read Liberal Jonathan Chait's horrified discussion of "fratricidal maniac" Hillary Clinton . And then read Thomas Lifson and Richard Baehr limn "The Tragedy of the Democratic Party" . Couldn't have happened to a more ... Read more

&quot;Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don't take away cars because we don't like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But w ... Read more

About five months ago I posted about the famous file-sharing paper by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf. I noted that the paper had been criticized in detail by Stan Liebowitz but that Liebowitz was hampered because he could not obtain the data from O-G and S. The story has now been picked up ... Read more

Here's a surprise (not!). Colleges discover that students get help on their application essays . Let's see: the SATs are &quot;culturally and economcally biased&quot;; grade inflation has greatly decreased the information in high school grades; now we learn that application essays are ... Read more

The homepage for Swarthmore's economics department presents seven &quot;Questions of Economics&quot;. The first one is &quot;What activities should governments undertake, and what can be left to markets?&quot; &quot; Left to markets&quot;?? In the department in wh ... Read more

" Why I Want To Be An Economist ". ... Read more

Joe Nocera, a business columnist for the New York Times ( winner of  "two Gerald Loeb awards and three John Hancock awards for excellence in business journalism"), writes about owners of bad sports teams (" Big-time Losers "). And he asks a question I've wondered about: Clearly, he' ... Read more