June 4, 2007
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[Update] As suggested in the comments, those who have volunteered as participants will be contacted in a week or two. It may be easier than we thought.
October 15, 2006
For the record, here's the cover
for the anthology of New Orleans essays.
Detail:
Tyler Cowan admires the new book by Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, The"Vanity of the Philosopher:" from Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics.
David Levy combines expertise in Adam Smith, ancient Greek democracy, non-normal distributions, Victorian literature, and advanced Monte Carlo techniques.
The book's ideas catch our attention because of what we noticed while working in barely-post-Soviet Eastern Europe:
March 1, 2006
Antique Marseilles map from Bibliodyssey, courtesy of Mangan's Miscellany. 
In the continuing "get a clue" series, the one that makes us sound like cackling geezers, we point you today to the Wall Street Journal review of Anya Kamenetz's Generation Debt, "breezily written and entertaining. But not always for the right reasons...The data fly off the page but should be tied down."
Continue reading "The Great Disappointment Epidemic of Early 2006" »
One Small Voice refers us to Alfred W. Crosby's The Measure of Reality.
How it is that Western European societies could have conquered so much of the world in the space of a few generations. The answer, he finds, is in certain agricultural and technological techniques. In this volume he turns to one set of techniques in particular: the precise measurement of time, number, and distance. That precise measurement enabled European armies to march in step, enabled navigators to find faraway ports, and enabled gunsmiths and chemists to formulate the weapons...
Also via Kathy Shaidle, Isabel Vincent writes about a slave traffic that began with Potemkin Marriages.
Many of the women I profiled had been “married” in their down-at-heel shtetls to elegantly dressed strangers who promised them a better life in the New World. But once they arrived at their destinations, they were shuttered in brothels and cut off rom their families and their coreligionists.
At the cemetery in Inhauma, you can still make out some of their faces in the sepia-toned plaques affixed to their graves. For decades, they have been condemned to silence, their stories still a source of deep shame for many of their descendents.
The story unreels to a Brazilian cemetery and backwards, painstakingly, from there.
Will Wilkinson gets to the point. Growth, both its hope and its results, is a happiness-maker.
The data is plain. Wealthier in general is happier. (The relationship is weak, sure. But a weak positive relationship isn’t no relationship, and definitely isn’t a negative one.)
Orphans, women, the desperately courageous naive, people, are better off with prosperity. The losses to "alienation," and cultural "disenchantment," are worth discussing. But the unhappiness of scarcity is far more than cornbread-not-steak on the dinner table, and the public library rather than the bookstore.
"Milton's Paradise Lost, one of the most sublime works of Western literature, [can be] reduced to a four-line text message (txtmsg)...
The new Yet Another Really Great Blog links to a recent speech by the Rene Girard scholar Gil Bailie in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, an event which gave "those sitting in safe, dry living rooms a rudimentary anthropological lesson in cultural fragility."
