by Henry Farrell on May 30, 2007
Chris Hayes’ “article”:http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070611&s=hayes on heterodox economics has gotten a lot of attention; for my money, the two best takes on it are “Ezra Klein’s”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/05/forgetting_the_.html and “Matt Yglesias’s”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/. As Matt says:
What heterodox economists are really challenging isn’t neoclassical economics but the political behavior of neoclassical economists. The recent Alan Blinder fracas is a case in point. He didn’t call any of the standard neoliberal case for free trade into question, and, indeed, didn’t argue against free trade at all. He just said something that he thought would be helpful in spurring the creation of the sort of social democratic society with an open market that he favors, while many economists saw his statements as giving aide and comfort to people who have a political agenda (blocking new trade agreements) that they don’t like.
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by Michael Bérubé on May 30, 2007
I believe my last post here — almost a month ago — was all about <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/03/time-check/”>not having enough time in the day</a>. Well, today my summer finally begins. I returned the last of my twelve graduate seminar essays, and I dropped off the First Child. I left him the car in which we drove 800 miles in one day, and flew back to central Pennsylvania the next day. Now that’s efficiency! We decided to forego <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/reporting_for_duty/”>the traditional father-son knife fight</a> upon parting, because I had myself a one-way airline ticket that I’d purchased only eight days before, and we figured I would attract quite enough attention in the airport without having to explain away sundry fresh flesh wounds.
Nick turned 21 last month, and will begin his senior year of college in the fall. I don’t know whether that makes me the CT contributor with the oldest child, but I figure I’ve got a shot at that dubious distinction. And so, for my return-from-little-hiatus post, I’m going to dilate a bit about parents and professors.
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by John Q on May 30, 2007
The piles of documents released as a result of litigation against Phillip Morris and Exxon are gifts that keep on giving for those of us interested in the process by which the Republican parallel universe has been constructed. Previous research has shown that the core proponents of global warming delusionism including Stephen Milloy, Fred Singer and Fred Seitz got their start as shills for PM, denying the risks of passive smoking. A string of rightwing thinktanks including Cato, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute helped to promote these hacks and the lies they were paid to peddle.
Now it’s turned out that one of the hardiest of parallel universe beliefs, the claim that Rachel Carson and the US ban on DDT were responsible for millions of deaths in the third world, arises from the same source.
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by Kieran Healy on May 30, 2007
Kevin Drum has often complained about the terrible state of data protection laws and the related burden of dealing with identity theft. Over the weekend, I was listening to “That Mitchell and Webb Sound”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Mitchell_and_Webb_Sound on Radio 4 and heard this sketch and thought it summed up the issues pretty well.