EconTech

That’s right. If you are like me, and ignore 90% of YouTube clips that get across my screen due to the surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) small hit rate for clips worth watching, you can now sit down to some rather nice videos (and often, mp3’s, you can even avoid flash by downloading the mp4s) [...]

All you really have to do is have a five minute conversation with most people to come up with some politician ‘they just don’t like.’ They have a bad ‘gut feeling,’ ‘instinct,’ or ‘just know’ that they are a rotten candidate with a money-grubbing, hateful, bitchy slut-of-a-wife (or husband) who will unduly influence an otherwise [...]

Just a follow up to the previous post, with some commentary from a failed version (not wholly constructed by me) and some further reading in the dark arts of baking.
1) Make your pie crust first and make sure it is ready to accept the filling before making the filling. Chemical reactions are going in a [...]

Via Andrew Gelman, a new political science blog has popped up. It has a number of good posts up for today, which is why it is getting added without waiting longer to see where it goes.
First, a good, simple chart of where your liberal New Yorker falls relative, politically, to the median American, relative to [...]

Ok, I just got finished scanning a holiday guide for geeks that I won’t link to because it is terrible (really Ars, poor choices). However, there was one product (besides the automatic litter box, which would be cool, if I had a cat) that caught my eye, the slanket. A blanket with sleeves would allow [...]

Sorry, I had a minor DNS issue due to a bug in a piece of my router that was telling the upstream dns server to not send wildcard dns requests (*.econtech.selfip.org) on to me to deal with after an IP change. If you are using Google Reader (and possibly similar services) to read this, you [...]

Courtesy of Justin Wolfers:
The front page of Sunday’s New York Times contained an interesting article reviewing research linking  the death penalty to homicide trends.  Adam Liptak attempts to provide a balanced account of the debate, noting first one set of findings:
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to [...]

Economists often say that voting isn’t rational. The basic argument being that the marginal impact of the vote (almost always zero) is trivial compared to marginal cost of voting (anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours, times the wage rate.. definitely above zero, depending on if you live in a Republican district or Demo…no, not [...]

In a policy debate, data is usually good. But it is important to put data in context. Before I rant:
“Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate”:
This is easy for me. It doesn’t matter whether the research on the issue is valid or not. I’m against the death penalty. Period.:
Does Death Penalty Save [...]

You often here in introductory economics courses that discussions of inequality is a separate issue as discussing poverty. I’ve always had a problem with these notes (and so have lots of other people). Besides the obvious mathematical connection (can you name how many measurements of inequality are not based on some measure of poverty or [...]

As I’ve tried explaining to a couple people a couple of times, Social Security is not a serious long term budget problem. And demography is not an enormous budget problem. Rising health costs are. Paul Krugman is much more qualified to provide the details, so here he is:

Long-run budget math

Some commenters have asked for more [...]

I often here the claim that goes something like this:
These scientists know that if they do research and results are in no way alarming, their research will gather dust on the shelf and their research careers will languish. But if they do research that sounds alarms, they will become well known and respected and receive [...]

Evolutionary Psychology over at Overcoming Bias:
Like “IRC chat” or “TCP/IP protocol”, the phrase “reproductive organ” is redundant. All organs are reproductive organs. Where do a bird’s wings come from? An Evolution-of-Birds Fairy who thinks that flying is really neat? The bird’s wings are there because they contributed to the bird’s ancestors’ [...]

For a friend who consistently misses the difference between natural selection and adaptation (and yes, I will continue to call you out when you say an organism evolves):
Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers:
No human being with the deliberate goal of maximizing their alleles’ inclusive genetic fitness, would ever eat a cookie unless they were starving. But individual [...]

You know you sometimes have a pot full of stuff that you need to get from A to B where the path, C, is a road, likely with bumps. This is a less than ideal situation, especially when the contents are hot and the pot will have to ride between your legs. Solution: Glue the [...]