getting it going

Hello everyone. It seems that after an early good run, things have started to slow down a little on the blog. Some of the new kids tell me that they were checking in everyday to see what we were talking about, but now they check in about once a week.

Let's get this going again. I think it was a great idea by Ariel, and that it can be a solid way to keep in touch and to take a break (for most of you) from the stress of school. It can also be a good way to have some interesting conversation.

The conversations don't have to be about technical extensions to models, though that's fine if that's what people want to talk about. Outside of the academy, a lot has been going on recently. The elections, the firing of Rumsfeld, the death of Friedman, Speaker Pelosi losing her first fight right out of the gate, Senator Biden calling for hearings on the war, the Iraq Study Group making recommendations, the Supreme Court hearing a partial-birth abortion case and Kennedy being the new man to watch, and Marquette trouncing Duke, just to name a few.

There are also some good economic policy questions that we can discuss without having to dust off any textbooks or start up STATA. We've got someone at the Fed from Cornell who is a fan of a school voucher system that punishes schools for underperforming. She found some good data on this from Florida and seems to make a reasonable case. Milton Friedman blamed the failure of the public school system on the fact that the government has a monopoly on public education.

I liked Andy's conversation earlier about the investment vs return of a college education. Andy, any more good applied micro questions we can chew on? We all know about macro, but does anyone know the burning questions on the frontier of public finance? Health economics? Labor? Maybe we could get some good research ideas from our conversation.

This is a good forum to discuss technical economics, to be sure, but it doesn't seem like people have the time or the inclination to do so. This is also a good forum for us to keep in touch and to have interesting conversation. Who knows, maybe in a couple of months people will look to our blog and to the Becker-Posner blog for their opinions? Probably not, but at least we can stay in touch.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

SLP and the Holy Rollers

So... a word to the wise, actually, two. If assigned half the problems in a chapter of Stokey Lucas in addition to other stuff for your macro problem set, you should probably assume that the SLP problems will take more than a day to complete. Secondly, the SLP Solutions Manual for these problems will almost certainly contain a mistake or will state something as obvious when in fact is not nearly trivial. So, just something to keep in mind.

I spent last weekend at Williams, getting out of MN for a change, to hang out with friends at Homecoming. We spanked Wesleyan, which was nice, and then I spent sunday in the library there finishing up what amounted to a new nsf proposal. Good times.

Also, I got to vote in a close election for the first time in my life. There was a pretty big debate for Governor out here, and the incumbent republican held onto his office by about 10000 votes, last I checked. It was fascinating, especially because funding for the university is a big issue in next year's budget, and the candidates had such different ideas over how to keep the U of M solvent yet affordable.

Secondly, I will assume that 50 people have already emailed Ben about this, but the New Yorker has an article this week about cyclists and NYC, and I thought it really captured the attitudes of the different personalities in the debate over transportation alternatives. You can get it off the new yorker's site, or I've put a pdf up on my page (here). Fun, interesting stuff.

Anyone around for thanksgiving?

-Ariel