Marginal Revolution

Just how good would drug legalization be?

John Nye, Megan McArdle and I debated this question at a party today (Robin Hanson asked that we not ban robots, some people called for open borders, John and I explained the hierarchy of the economics profession to Will Wilkinson, and Bryan Caplan told me I have the uncanny ability to predict when people will die, among other highlights; sadly Alex had to leave early).  We also asked some questions that are seldom asked.

Under one model, local gangs have a more or less fixed ability to terrorize a neighborhood.  Even if everything is legalized, the gangs will continue local monopolies to maximize tribute, subject of course to constraints from other gangs and the police.  In this model, legalizing drugs doesn't do much good.  The local gang either shifts its monopoly to another area (milk and sugar, if need be), or de facto the gang's local monopoly on the drug trade continues.  The gang busts you if you try to get your supply of crack cocaine from Merck.  I call this the Rio de Janeiro model; no, drugs are not formally legal there but I don't think it would much matter if they were.

Under a second model, the ability of a local gang to monopolize and terrorize depends on the availability of drug trade revenue.  Take away illegal drugs and the gang collapses -- Merck outcompetes them -- and the neighborhood revitalizes.

Libertarian arguments for legalization typically envision the second model rather than the first.  I expect something in between.  So I don't favor the War on Drugs but I believe the benefits from stopping that war are often exaggerated.  Note that whether the first or second scenario holds may depend on just how easy drugs are to get legally.

One claim was that -- a'la Freakonomics -- current drug suppliers don't reap huge rents, so legalizing drugs won't much discourage them.

Another question from the evening is how much the abolition of zoning in New York City would boost gross national product.  I heard some overoptimistic estimates on that one.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I give the party at least a nine. 

Can we learn anything from the Democratic spat?

Between Clinton and Obama, that is.  One thing we learn is just how unpleasant a politics of confrontation can be and that's no matter what your political point of view.  Most voters don't define their views along the distinctions set down by the policy wonks.  So if you wish to start a political conflict to get your way on the wonky issues, that means you also end up starting a war -- possibly unintended -- on identity politics and also power politics.  Furthermore at least one of the sides in that war will care more about winning and seizing/keeping power than about policy per se.  Over time that's the side most likely to get its way.

We also learn that the American public polarizes along undesirable fault lines, observes a fight and puts a pox on both houses, and in general becomes more cynical about politics.  Think about this before pursuing polarization and quasi-class warfare.

The implication, however, is not that you always should stay put.  After all, today's status quo is a) highly imperfect, and b) the result of the ugly identity wars inherited from the past and surely that is not sacred either.

Nonetheless constructivist attempts to remake America will, by political debate, be reshaped along traditional fault lines.  That means your good idea -- be it libertarian, progressive, or whatever -- had better be pretty robust to mangling by the stupid, the emotional, the cynical, and the ill-informed.  It also means your policy analysis had better start with a good understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the United States and try to build in a sustainable direction with the weights and the angles favoring what you wish to accomplish.  Tocqueville, Montesquieu and Madison look smarter and smarter all the time.

A while ago the progressives told us that we needed to fight a battle against the Republicans to reshape America.  Now there is a prior battle within the Democratic Party itself, noting of course that the hedge fund managers are sending most of their donations that way.  And even Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein can't agree on which candidate is the real progressive.  How many steps further backward will be taken?  We haven't even gotten to the point of trying to write progressive legislation or get it through Congress.

Resist the temptation to put the backward steps into the category of "the utopian should."  Such a move runs as follows: "OK, we didn't do that, we should have done that.  I never predicted we would do that.  I just should we should have."  (Libertarians I might add often commit a similar vice.)  That response is non-falsifiable and so you can hold on to it all you want, but you'd get further by embracing the evolutionary yet non-Panglossian tradition in political thought.  Similarly, libertarians should take more seriously the idea that Sweden should build on its current strengths as well.

I'll be frank: I'm not rooting for Hillary Clinton.  But that's not for any instrumental reason or for that matter for any quasi-libertarian reason or not even for the many reasons you'll find outlined by Andrew Sullivan.  It's for purely subjective and arbitrary reasons and I won't say more than that (though I could).  Maybe I'd drop that dislike if she'd wave around a copy of Fredric Bastiat but in the meantime there you go.  Note also that I am hardly the most biased person evaluating this political race and that I didn't feel this way a year ago.

The bottom line is this: real world political debate is not fundamentally a macro-cosm of the thought processes of a smart person, or of one smart person debating another.  The politics of confrontation usually turn ugly. 

How to choose an apartment

Omkar, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I'm looking for an apartment (Fremont), and it's my first one. Do you think that most people over or underinvest in the quality of their accommodations? On one hand, it's where you spend the most time (especially if you're like me and have in-house hobbies). On the other, I think it's probably easy to overestimate the impact an additional unit of luxury housing will have on everyday life.

The standard results from the happiness literature are that people grow accustomed to lots of living space but that we undervalue the hassle of a lengthy or stressful commute.  Kahneman's work also suggests you should spend more time with your friends, so maybe that means living near them as well.  I don't know if these results are true at all margins.  Moving from a mid-sized mansion to a large mansion probably doesn't make you happier, but the switch from a one- to two-bedroom apartment might.

Personally, I'll stress the benefits of rooming with someone who is both compatible and intelligent, but that isn't exactly the question that was asked.  Your apartment should also be a gateway to new experiences, so perhaps you should live near the highway. or other effective modes of transport.

So, readers, when we are looking for an apartment, what is the bias we are most likely to have?

Trade and inequality, revisited -- Rooftops edition

Another way of investigating the relationship between inequality and trade with poor countries implies that China may actually help the poor, suggests new work from University of Chicago economists Christian Broda and John Romalis.

Instead of focusing purely on what's produced outside of the country, Broda and Romalis turn their attention to an interesting but obvious relationship between imports and consumption within our border: The goods exported by poorer countries are typically consumed by lower-income Americans. Our typical methods of quantifying inequality, however, don't take this into account.

At the same time, inflation in the price of these goods has fallen behind inflation in services, which make up a greater portion of what wealthier people buy. Taken together, these trends imply that official measures may be overstating the rise in inequality.

Looking at trade data between 1994 and 2005, Broda and Romalis construct inflation rates for different income groups and find that rates for the richest outpaced rates for the poorest by about 4 percent over the period. Since income inequality between the top and bottom 10 percent of earners grew by about 6 percent, the different inflation rates among income groups wipes out about two-thirds of the rise in inequality.

The emphasis in that last sentence is mine.  It continues:

China's role in this new way of analyzing inequality is large, accounting for about 50 percent of the total reduction.

And scream this part from the rooftops too [how do you scream a parenthesis?]:

(A very interesting aside. Broda and Romalis also find that the poor are more likely than the rich to buy newer goods. Because of the lag in how quickly the CPI tracks new products, the researchers argue that once this "new goods bias" which serves to keep official inflation rates higher than they actually are since newer goods are typically cheaper, is factored out, inequality between the rich and the poor between 1994 and 2005 may not have changed at all.)

Here is the link.  Again, here is the Broda and Romalis paper.  If this holds up it is big, big news and we must revise many claims that have been made about inequality, trade, and China.

Assorted links

1. The emancipatory power of the American hotel

2. The ideological migration of Christopher Hitchens

3. What do we understand about recessions?, by Bob Hall, via Mark Thoma

4. What should the World Bank know about governance?, starring Acemoglu, Rodrik, North, Fukuyama and others

5. When learning by example backfires

6. Update on auction-rate securities

Seasteading

A small but passionate minority is deeply dissatisfied with current political systems.  These people seek the autonomy to live under and experiment with different political, social, and economic systems than currently exist. It is this search for sovereignty, for the freedom of self-government, which is the fundamental motivation for seasteading.

That's Patri Friedman (son of David, son of Milton) and Wayne Gramlich in their seasteading manifesto. In interesting news, The Seasteading Institute has secured funding of $500,000 from PayPal founder Peter Thiel to help make the idea a reality.

Long-term trends are somewhat favorable for seasteading because with a cell phone and internet access more and more people could live on a seastead and make a living.  Cruise ships are already floating cities with few regulations or taxes.  Harold Berman argues that the rise of the West was due to competitive law.  Homeowner's organizations, hotels and condos are private governments (for more see my edited book The Voluntary City.).

Competitive law appears to increase efficiency but it's less clear that competition among governments gives rise to a libertarian world.  Homeowner associations, for example, often impose stricter zoning regulations than cities.  You could say that the system as a whole is more libertarian, but no one lives in the system as a whole.

Maybe liberty comes not from choice of government but from forcing people who are unlike to live together.  Isn't the real reason the First Amendment has any force not that people agree on the value of freedom of speech but rather that they disagree on who they want to shut up?  Is religious freedom a product of agreement on the value of religious freedom or is it a product of disagreement on who is going to hell?      

Still I hope for the best and congratulate Patri.  Seasteading has come a long way.

Questions that are rarely asked, a continuing series

Why do affluent, middle-class, and poor voters all seem so exquisitely sensitive to election-year income growth for the wealthiest families?

Oddly, the voting of lower-income voters is relatively insensitive to their own election-year incomes.  One option is that media reporting is biased toward coverage of the rich and famous.  Another option is that we, as voters, are biased toward considering our pleasure or displeasure with the strength of the high-ranking members of our tribe.

That question is from Larry Bartels's Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.

Here is a previous installment in the series.

Rating RateMyProfessors.com

You’ve heard the reasons why professors don’t trust RateMyProfessors.com, the Web site to which students flock. Students who don’t do the work have equal say with those who do. The best way to get good ratings is to be relatively easy on grades, good looking or both, and so forth. But what if the much derided Web site’s rankings have a high correlation with markers that are more widely accepted as measures of faculty performance? Last year, a scholarly study found a high correlation between RateMyProfessors.com and a university’s own system of student evaluations. Now, a new study is finding a high correlation between RateMyProfessors and a student evaluation system used nationally.

Strike another victory for Web 2.0.  Here is more.

Stupid Box Tricks for Intellectuals

This is stupid but it makes me laugh the more I think about it. The original idea is due to Claude Shannon.  Hat tip to Boing Boing.

Is Richard Posner right about air travel and its problems?

Who better to ask than Air Genius Gary Leff:?

...the usually sober, sometimes brilliant, and certainly prolific judge and scholar offers up an unusually misguided rant on why he believes “airline service is so bad” over at the Becker-Posner Blog...

Here is Posner's charge, which I might add calls for air travel reregulation.  Read Gary's whole response.  I don't, as they say, have a horse in this race (noting that Gary and I work together at GMU).  What I do know points to two major problems: badly run airports (rather than air travel deregulation per se) and too many flights clustered at peak hours.  That puts me closer to Gary's analysis than Posner's.  Congestion pricing and true markets for all airport services would solve many of the problems, in my view.

Graduate school advice

A loyal MR reader asks:

I am now beginning the process of choosing classes for next year. I thought your advice might again be useful. I am in the unusual position of finding nearly all fields potentially interesting. I also feel relatively capable of pursuing most of them, with the exception of pure theory or pure econometrics...I am tempted to do economic history + something else. If I do history, perhaps I ought to do finance, micro, or metrics in order to signal technical capability?

If you were in my place, what fields would you choose? Are their particular people...at XXXX...whom you would absolutely want to take a course with/work with? Is it possible to be a macroeconomist without doing extremely technical work? Are some fields more tolerant of heterodox views than others? You told us [once] that you thought econ. grad. school should be Micro 1 - Micro 16. Does this mean I ought to take more micro next year? Given my limited ability to know where my interests will lie in the future, how should I think about this decision?

My advice here is simple: 

1. To potential academic employers you are defined by your job market paper, your letters of recommendation, and by your publications, if you have any.  Your formal "fields" aren't that important, nor are your classes per se.

2. Pick classes to learn skills and choose your classes on the quality of the professor, not on the topic per se. A quick classroom visit often reveals this quality within thirty seconds.

3. Pick a mentor that you, on a personal basis, relate to very well.  This is of extreme importance.  If he or she doesn't like you, all is lost.

By the way, here is Ben Casnocha's advice on how to be a good mentee.  What other advice would you all give this person?   

The Countercyclical Asset, part II

During a recent book interview, an ABC news anchor asked me what kind of impact the real world's subprime mortgage crisis and related fallout would have on Second Life's economy.  I speculated that it would probably provide an ironic boost, noting how the last recession of 2003 was important to Second Life's early growth.  "I can't tell you how many people I met then," I told her, "who were out-of-work programmers and web designers creating content in SL while they looked for jobs." 

That was an off-the-cuff answer, but the latest economic figures from Linden Lab suggest a similar pattern may indeed be happening now.  In-world spending activity has been increasing steadily since the mid-2007 prohibition against virtual gambling.  "The Second Life economy," Zee Linden noted, "does not appear to be affected by the slowing economy of the United States."  SL blogger Roland Legrand took a look at the numbers, and had a similar thought to me: "Could it be that people find refuge from the 'real world' troubles in virtual worlds and that the SL economy 'profits' in that way from the crisis?" 

Here is the link.  Here is the first installment of The Countercyclical Asset.

Nabokov's last work will not be burned

Surprise.  That's against his deathbed instructions, in case you haven't been following the controversy.

Europe fact of the day

Ahem:

At a time when the world’s top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy’s major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth.

Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent.

And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.

Here is the full story.

Non-mainstream schools of thought

A loyal MR reader requests coverage:

On mainstream versus "fringier" economic schools of thought (and schools themselves too if you like); and on different schools of thought generally, and your take on them; where economic theory is at present.

Here is me on Sraffa and the neo-Ricardians and also post-Keynesians and the Cambridge capital debates.  The Austrians I cover all the time.  Here is my post on what is new and essential in economics.  Overall I don't believe in schools of thought for modern economics.  Think of the notion of a school of thought as a brand.  The whole point of the internet is to break down branding into the evaluation smaller units, including individuals and their very particular ideas, even doing cite counts paper by paper.  Why move toward more macro branding in that kind of environment?  You can think of trustworthy bloggers as another means of branding and also as substitutes for schools of thought.

Today I see neuroeconomics and personality psychology as two frontiers, plus economic history, but I wouldn't call any of those schools of thought, nor should they be.

Hendrik Houthakker dies at 83

Here is the Post obituary.  Here is Houthakker at scholar.google.com, most of all on consumer behavior and conditions under which revealed preference is a coherent theory of individual behavior.  Here is another obituary; not only did he serve on the CEA twice but he was selected by the Pope as Knight Commander with Star in the Papal Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great.

Demand Response

A large share of the special green issue of the NYTimes Magazine was closely tied to economics.  I find this encouraging.  Here is one interesting bit:

...demand response has become one of the most powerful green techniques for protecting the nation’s overtaxed power grids. When a blackout looms, utilities call a small coterie of demand-response firms. These firms prearrange for major users of electricity — factories, shopping malls, skyscrapers — to shut down all nonessential electricity in exchange for payments, often totaling tens of thousands of dollars each year. It’s expensive, but far less so than a blackout that cascades across the country....ConsumerPowerline controls 300 huge buildings in New York alone, where hastily brokered turnoffs by Macy’s and major hotels prevented the spread of a 2006 blackout in Queens — a blackout that lasted for more than a week — into Manhattan.

From the comments: "America the Beautiful"?

I'm always one for airing grievances:

Tyler, Common among economists and some among the autisitic spectrum is the tenedency to belive the map is more real than the landscape, the model complete and accurate and that everything you were taught in econ seminars came donw on tablets. The Candide, America love it or leave it attitude is a tad tiresome. There are problems out there big guy and the Solow model or the Romer Model don't mean shit.

Here is a compendium of my anti-American attitudes:

1. The number of Americans in prison remains an underreported scandal, as well as the conditions they face.

2. Problems of race relations are underestimated, to this very day.

3. For whatever reasons, smart American women seem to be more insecure than are Western European women.  Yes that's a vulnerable overgeneralization and I will take some lumps for it in the comments but I still think it's basically true.

4. I could not live in rural America and be happy.

5. America faces a massive current and future problem resulting from the apparent uneducability of a large chunk of its citizens.  While I do favor school choice, it's not just government education which is at fault; many better school systems around the world are government-run.

6. Gun owners may well be happy, but it is not a culture I relate to.

7. The American culture of individual freedom is closely linked to the prevalence of mental illness and gun-based violence in this country.  We can't seem to get only the brighter side of non-conformity.

8. America is the worst offender when it comes to factory farming and the treatment of animals.

On the brighter side, America has a decent economic track record, the Solow model does matter (try living and earning in countries with poor Solow indicators), America remains the world's leading innovator, and most Americans -- at least those not in prison or on drugs -- can expect a bright future.  It's not as if I'm pushing the future economic prospects of Suriname. 

I also believe (contra the blogging progressives) that America is fated (for better or worse, but in my view not worse) to remain predominantly captured by corporate interests and that America does a better job absorbing and elevating immigrants than perhaps any other country. 

Many Europeans fear deep down that America will have a permanently higher growth rate and that the European way of life will, sooner or later, be forced to disappear.  Right now I would bet against this proposition, as I see a new Europe revitalized by intra-EU immigration.  But there is still, say, a 30 percent chance it is true and polemics against Uncle Sam are in part a reflection of that deep insecurity.   

More on energy pessimism

Paul Krugman writes:

You might say that this is my answer to those who cheerfully assert that human ingenuity and technological progress will solve all our problems. For the last 35 years, progress on energy technologies has consistently fallen below expectations.

It's worth noting that if we had to build today's energy infrastructure working under the current regulatory and NIMBY burden, it probably could not be done.  So it shouldn't be surprising that building a new energy infrastructure is proving so hard.  There's a reason why many of us think deregulation is a big issue and it's not because we want to see people poisoned by Chinese botchagaloop.

Division of labor is limited by the extent of the market

His specialty is static apnea: holding your breath while remaining immobile in a swimming pool. It requires some of same skills as being buried alive for a week, Mr. Blaine said: “It’s all in your mind. You’ve got to stay calm and slow everything down.”

The guy can hold his breath for sixteen minutes; here is the article, interesting throughout.  He is also versatile:

As a self-described endurance artist, he’d spent 35 hours atop a 105-foot pole and survived a week buried in a coffin. He’d fasted for 44 days in a box suspended over the Thames, a nutritional experiment that was written up in The New England Journal of Medicine (with Mr. Blaine listed as a co-author).

Nor had I known this:

Immersing the face in water produces a protective action in humans similar to that in dolphins, seals, otters and whales. Called the mammalian diving reflex, it quickly lowers the heart rate and then constricts blood vessels in the limbs so that blood is reserved for the heart and the brain.

What will happen with commodity prices?

Megan McArdle gives one bottom line, referring to Paul Krugman's somewhat pessimistic column.  I would say that China has been massively productive but not so much in producing commodities.  That means the demand for commodities has gone up much more rapidly than the supply.  You could imagine an alternative universe in which China grew by figuring out ways to produce oil, copper, and rice much more cheaply.  Of course that's not what happened and it is relatively easy to see why not.  Following some good policy changes, Chinese growth has been driven by a massive rural to urban migration and yes we are talking about hundreds of millions of people.  It's plastic basketballs that have become cheaper, not the products of farms.

The mere addition of labor inputs to urban areas doesn't, in the short run, help you produce commodities more cheaply.  Think of the Solow model where K and L have gone up lots but the rate of generating new ideas is only slightly higher.

When all those new Chinese engineers and scientists are at the peak of their creative powers, this relationship will reverse itself and commodities prices will plunge.  But it's quicker to produce another toy than to bring about a new Green Revolution, so in the meantime commodity prices are very high.  I give the current price trend another ten or fifteen years or so to run.  Eventually high commodity prices will seem permanent and then the bottom will drop out.

We've never had a rapid and successful migration of hundreds of millions before, ever.

What I've Been Reading

1. The World is What It Is, by Patrick French.  This authorized (yes, authorized) biography digs up all the dirt on V.S. Naipaul; I've never read anything like it.  Here is a Paul Theroux review.  Here is another rave review.  Theroux's own self-loathing, quasi-fictional biography of his "friendship" with Naipaul -- Sir Vidia's Shadow -- remains one of my favorite books but this is a wonderful sequel.  And if you haven't read through Naipaul's ouevre you should, especially A Bend in the River, A Turn in the South, and Among the Believers, among others.  There is something to be said for misanthropy raised to an art form and packed with intellectual content.

2. Paradise with Serpents, by Robert Carver.  The only question is whether this is the first or the second best book on Paraguay in the English language; here is the other contender.

3. The wisdom of Arnold Kling

4. Problems with farm price futures, worth a read.

Answering your questions

Who knows, maybe I'll try to get to them all.  Here's the first:

What impact will algorithmic game theory have on economics?

I'd start by asking: will game theory pure and simple have (further) impact on economics?  And I'd say basically "no."  The common concepts and tricks of game theory are invaluable but we already have those and I don't see any more coming down the pike.  Algorithmic game theory will address problems internal to game theory and within that context it will flourish.  Finding equilibria, and discriminating among multiple equilibria, are otherwise very difficult problems and AGT is a natural way to crack those nuts.  So AGT will have continued practical applications in computer science and problems of engineering.  But it won't much affect how most economists think about the world or do their research.

As for NBA analysis, I'll just say that a) Boston is still an odds-on favorite, b) No one ever really told us what happened to Andrew Bynum, and c) Even though Phoenix probably won't make it, the Shaq trade was very clearly a good idea and all you doubters should offer up mea culpas.

Tabarrok on NPR

Here's me talking about bounty hunters and private prisons with Margot Adler.

Request for requests

Comments are open, so please let us know what you are interested in reading about.  The only promise is that of weak monotonicity, namely that your mention won't lower the chance of the topic being covered.

Million dollar blocks

An innovative analysis by Eric Cadora highlights "million-dollar blocks" -- individual city blocks where more than one million dollars per block per year are spent to incarcerate individuals from that block.  Some blocks cost over five million dollars per year...A million dollars, coincidentally, is roughly what it would cost to pay for one patrol officer, twenty-four hours a day, every day for one year.

That is from Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood: My Year Spent Policing Baltimore's Eastern District.  In Brooklyn of 2003, there were 35 million dollar blocks.  Here is more information, plus maps and graphs.

Bad Money

That's the new book by Kevin Phillips.  He concludes:

The thirty- to forty-year tumble from national preeminence that made life more glum for most folk in seventeenth-century Spain, and eighteenth-century Holland, and the Britain from the 1910s to the 1950s may be somewhat moderated for the United States because of a position as a North American continental economic power with a large resource and population base...

Boo hoo, I say; I'll be crying all the way to Rio.  Overall this book is a catalog of the usual arguments about the financial problems of the United States, peak oil, the potential weakness of the dollar, and related worries.  Phillips doesn't seem to think that finance is much of a productive economic sector.  He is keen on the "inflation is larger than we realize" line, citing high growth rates for M3 (he doesn't realize how much the different aggregates can move around and differ from each other) and then the Fed's discontinuation of that statistic.  But who has been tricked?  Either the current market estimate of inflation is the best estimate available, or you know that it is wrong and you will be a very rich man.  I find the former scenario more plausible.

If there's anything wrong with gdp statistics, it's either environmental problems or that we don't have good measures of the productivity of government itself.  Those problems are built into how the number is calculated and there is no conspiracy to make America look much richer than it really is.

There is remarkably little on future expected productivity growth or whether America will solve the problem of educating its non-upwardly-mobile, which are both (the?) major issues for our economic future.  The author should spend a week locked in a room with the Solow model.  There is also precious little recognition that America in twenty years' time will almost certainly be a good bit wealthier than today.  Given that no other country is about to take us over, does relative international status really matter so much for the happiness of Americans?  I don't think so.  The richer the Chinese get, the more I feel good about living in the world's first country to be a true product of The Enlightenment.  If only Phillips could feel the same way.

The future of Toyota

Some of Toyota's U.S. plans are now more than 20 years old, and a growing number of its workers are paid the top wage of about $25 an hour.  That's less than Detroit's veteran union hands make now, but a contract inked last fall will enable U.S. automakers to replace many highly paid employees with cheaper workers.  By 2011, Toyota's cost advantage over Detroit could disappear.

By late 2009, Toyota's assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky could have the highest labor costs of any auto factory in the country.  Here is the story.

When I visited Utah, I rented a Hyundai and I have to say it drove very nicely...

Assorted links

1. Don't fire John Yoo

2. Income inequality, from Greg Mankiw

3. How much appearing on Colbert helps your book

4. India's "brain gain"

Ain't My America

The author is Bill Kauffman and the subtitle is The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism.  Here is one excerpt:

Above all, they feared empire, whose properties were enumerated well by the doubly pen-named Garet Garrett: novelist, exponent of free enterprise and individualism, and a once-reliable if unspectacular stable horse for the Saturday Evening Post.  Writing in 1953, he set down a quintet of imperial requisites.

1. The executive power of the government shall be dominant.

2. Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.

3. Ascendancy of the military mind to such a point at last that the civilian mind is intimidated.

4. A system of satellite nations.

5. A complex of vaunting and fear.

He could have listed this too.  In my view this book goes wrong by failing to consider that the right-wing, anti-militarist tradition was wrong on some pretty critical cases.  Nonetheless if you are looking for a well-informed, well-written, and up-to-date book on that tradition, consider this your go-to source.