EconTech

Tyler writes:

Bargaining with your roommates
Joseph, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I recently leased my first apartment…with a friend who just graduated from college with me. It’s a nice apartment, and spacious, but it has one bedroom that is larger and nicer (better views, bigger closet, more windows) than the other.
We’re looking for the most equitable way [...]

Economics & Sci-Fi: Two Great Tastes…
… that don’t go well together?
I happened to see a few episodes from season I of Masters of Science Fiction and it got me thinking…
Economics is a science (yes it is, don’t argue with me!), so why is there no economic fiction? Sure, from Physics you get time travel and [...]

The popularity of statistics?
Jennifer pointed me to this site, which states that “white people hate math” but “are fascinated by ‘the power of statistics’ since the math has already been done for them.” I’d like to believe this is true (the part about white people liking statistics, not the part about the math having already [...]

I always knew the prices were much higher than I was willing to pay (luckily, there is always a Walgreens, grocery, or liquor store nearby). I never suspected the larges were so large small though (Felix Salmon via Cowen):
Popcorn fact of the day
[Richard] McKenzie did a fair amount of real-world research on the popcorn front, [...]

Prompted by Gabriel (that is, blame him for this):
113
Do you have any idea how hard it is to spell some countries? I didn’t get to most of Eastern and Southern Asia or Australia and the Pacific. 5 minutes is a lot shorter than I thought when visualizing maps and typing names I write out approximately [...]

Game Designers Desperately Need Economics
I’ve been playing some Rise of Nations lately—think Age of Empires if you don’t know it. I like it but playing an Absolute Planner gets tired and frustrating at some point.
The production side is quite complex for a game of this type: resource extraction is done via linear production function augmented by [...]

This was hilarious “If there’s one thing President Bush taught me (and there is only one thing he taught me), it’s that a federal executive has the authority to expand his own authority.” It’d be even funnier if it wasn’t terribly depressing. From the following post:
First Greenspan criticizes my efforts to clean up the subprime [...]

and Colbert got his Peabody. Now he’ll never shut up. Thank the Gods. From The Monkey Cage:
Annals of Improbable Research

Forthcoming from James Fowler in PS: Political Science and Politics
Stephen Colbert, the host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, claims that politicians who appear on his show will become more popular and are more likely to [...]

Well, that is one tack at least. I don’t consider myself one, though. I believe that once a framework is in place, utilitarian considerations can get us considerably far along in judgment. Anyway, this is amusing:
 
 
Are economists brain damaged?
 
Many economists espouse utilitarianism as a superior ethical framework to proposed alternatives. A paper in Nature magazine [...]

Are you? Yes, you likely are. Though you maybe union-ized or un-ionized or both. Just another reason for non-native speakers to hate English.

From the Monkey Cage:

Picture of the Week
January 25th, 2008 by Paul Butler · No Comments

President Bush talks to an audience member after he spoke in Washington DC on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Though, of course, it has no data backing it up. Doesn’t make it any less amusing:
Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych

Prerequisite:  Evolutionary Psychology
Years ago, before I left my parents’ nest, I was standing in front of a refrigerator, looking inside.  My mother approached and said, “What are you doing?”  I said, “Looking for the ketchup.  I don’t [...]

I want that phone number.
Telecommunications Exorcism in Reeves, LA
A town in the US state of Louisiana is to be allowed to change its telephone prefix so that residents can avoid a number many associate with the Devil. Christians in Reeves have been unhappy since the early 1960s about being given the prefix, 666 - traditionally [...]

By Melissa R. Fledscher, Intern for Women for Obama.
‘Twas the night before Christmas and through Senate and House,
The future looked bleak for Bill Clinton’s spouse.
Her stockings were hung with the greatest of care,
But the votes out in Iowa just weren’t there.
John Edwards cursed with the luck of Bob Shrum,
Had visions of caucuses and sugarplum.
And Biden [...]