From The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
The Republican Party of Wisconsin has made an open records request for the emails of a University of Wisconsin professor of history, geography and environmental studies in an apparent response to a blog post the professor wrote about a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
I wanted to add a few quick additional comments to Ilan Noy’s reflections on the possible economic implications of the tragedy in Japan.
If you’re not too busy forecasting oil prices and the stock market, try your hand at the 2011 Econbrowser NCAA tournament challenge. All you have to do is go to the Econbrowser group at ESPN, do some minor registering to create a free ESPN account if you haven’t used that site before, and make your picks for the winners of each game. Just make sure you complete your entry before Thursday, because the Econbrowser group only allows predictions before the tournament begins.
From AP:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A spending plan being pushed by Republicans would slash funding for the agency that warned Hawaii and the West Coast about the devastating tsunami in Japan.
Time magazine has a list of the 25 best financial blogs, in which they included blog reviews written by other bloggers. Here’s what I said about my favorite blog:
If you only follow one economics blog, it has to be Calculated Risk, run by Bill McBride. The site provides concise and very accessible summaries of all the key economic data and developments. One of the reasons McBride is able to do this so well is that he has an almost uncanny knack of recognizing which facts really matter. He began the blog in 2005 because he saw a disaster brewing in the form of the housing bubble, and tried his best to warn the rest of us of what was coming. I’ve followed him closely ever since, and I don’t know if he’s ever been wrong. My advice is, if you’ve come up with a different conclusion from McBride on how economic developments are going to unfold, you’d be wise to think it over again!
The Wall Street Journal has a new list of the best economics blogs, but may have inadvertently omitted the names of some of the best economics bloggers.
I didn’t have time to put together a detailed post for today. But fortunately, I see that Bill McBride has done a much better job than I could of summarizing what to look for in 2011.
Some quick links on the flash crash, China’s rare earth elements monopoly, Larry Summers, and economics at UCSD.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
I have been pondering two seemingly separate issues — the first, what constitutes an “elite”. David Brooks says it’s bobos; Charles Murray says it’s those who “…spend school with people who are mostly just like them — which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.” Personally, I always thought American elites were football players and the folks highlighted on Entertainment Tonight, given the amount of attention devoted to those two groups. (See other recent commentary here) The second, as a social scientist, what interests should one expect the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to be lobbying for [1] (since we do not have direct observation on the funding of the group, we need to infer the interests). I have come to a single answer that partly addresses both of these two questions:
Fortunately for me, I don’t like peanut butter. From NYT, on the Senate bill to expand FDA powers and increase funding: