Links

Cleanin’ up a month’s worth o’links.

• Michael Totten interviews Christopher Hitchens – part I, part II. Probably a good thing they stopped there, as I would have just kept reading indefinitely.
• How to rise fast at work. Rings true.
• Interview with Eugene Fama, a ‘Chicago-school’ economist on the bubble. (HT CARPE DIEM.) Excerpt:
  
  

  I don’t know what a credit bubble means. I don’t even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don’t think they have any meaning.

• “Liberalism” is the opposite of liberalism. Something I’ve been saying for years now.
• Martin Regnen on “voudoun”, progressivism and signalling.
• David Henderson says that Paul Krugman actually agrees with me that forbidding insurance companies from taking pre-existing conditions into account is stupid. Krugman just disagrees with how to get around the stupidity. Henderson says Krugman’s idea won’t work. I agree with Henderson.
• M. Simon finds a Nature article seeming to indicate that the CFC ban as an example of successful environmental policy may be problematic because there never really was an ozone “hole”. Analogies to certain contemporary debates are obvious.
• Alex Tabarrok on the problems with the term ‘capitalism’:
  
  

  It is true that capitalism was named by its enemies. Thus, it’s interesting to note that a socialist is someone who believes in socialism, a communist someone who believes in communism but a capitalist is someone with capital. [...] So if we name crony capitalism, capitalism, and if we can’t name capitalism, socialism, then what should capitalism be named?

  My answer: ‘freedom’.

• curi critiques food stamps.
• Dan Simon brings us the last television news report we’ll ever need to watch:

• Charles Rowley on the Chrysler bankruptcy and the rule of law.
• Fearsome Tycoon on the governing assumption of liberals.
• Arnold Kling is worth reading here on models and hunches. His hunch is not to trust models. So is mine.
• Via Tyler Cowen, James M. Buchanan says Economists have no clothes. For example,
  
  

  Economists do not really understand what they are doing….

• Via Pastorius, the resurrection, right under everyone’s noses, of a crude anti-Semitic stereotype in the highly-accoladed British period drama An Education. Which I wasn’t gonna see anyway, now I just gotta figure out how to not-see it twice….
• Finally, via Chris Byrne (and now a zillion others), if you haven’t seen Rock Sugar yet, you should. Or at least, you will….

[Via http://rwcg.wordpress.com]