Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Financial Crisis

• Systemic Risk and Fannie Mae

“The education of Joe Stiglitz and Peter Orszag.”

Foreign Policy

• The Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama, by Fouad Ajami 

 “A foreign policy of penance has won America no friends.”

Law and Economics

• Terror by Trial Lawyer, by William McGurn

“Arlen Specter would make it easier for terrorists to sue.”

Science and Public Policy

• Climategate: Follow the Money, by Bret Stephens

“Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God. ”

• The Climate Science Isn’t Settled, by Richard Lindzen

“Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Financial Crisis

• Lack of Candor and the AIG Bailout, by Peter Wallison

“If AIG wasn’t too big to fail, why did the government rescue it? And why do we need to turn the financial system upside down?”

Politics

• He Can’t Take Another Bow, by Peggy Noonan

“An icon of a White House that is coming to seem amateurish.”

Public Policy

• Cap and Trade Is Dead, by Kim Strassel

“The recently disclosed emails and documents from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit compromise the integrity of the United Nations’ global warming reports.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Economics

• Obamanomics, by Jeffrey Miron

“Harvard economics guru beaks down Obamas’ income redistribution plan.”

Health Care Reform

• The Other Senate Maverick, by William McGurn

“Joe Lieberman is a party apostate on health care.”

• Healthcare Reform and the Big Tradeoff, by Greg Mankiw
• The Values Question, by David Brooks

“Like all great public issues, the health care debate is fundamentally about values, about whether we have a moral preference for vitality or security.”

Highly Recommended

• Happy Franksgiving, by Melanie Kirkpatrick

“How FDR tried, and failed, to change a national holiday.”

• The Desolate Wilderness, by Nathaniel Morton

“A chronicle (written in 1620) of the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof.”

Public Policy

• Homebuyer Tax Credits Threaten the FHA, by Robert Pozen

“Funding a down payment with the credit increases the odds the buyer will default.”

Risk & Uncertainty

• The Uncertainty Economy

“Nurturing a fragile economic recovery into a durable expansion requires policies that restore public confidence and reassure investors, risk-takers and employers. The Democratic agenda is doing precisely the opposite, which is how you get subpar growth and fewer new jobs.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Economics

• Krugman to the Rescue, by Steve Landsburg

Financial Crisis

• Why No One Expects a Strong Recovery, by Jeb Hensarling and Paul Ryan

“When you repeal sound economic policies you repeal their results.” 

Law

• Travesty in New York, by Charles Krauthammer

“For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the “propaganda of the deed.” And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 — not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.”

Politics

• Help Wanted, by Kim Strassel

“The Democratic Party seeks a wildly optimistic individual to oversee a national jobs-creation program.”

• Medicalizing mass murder, by Charles Krauthammer

“What a surprise — that someone who shouts “Allahu Akbar” (the “God is great” jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre playing down Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs.”

Religion

• The China President Obama Didn’t See, by Leslie Hook

“Dissident intellectuals have been attracted to Christianity.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Financial Crisis

• An Alternative Stimulus Plan, by Michael Boskin

“A payroll tax cut would add three to four million jobs at a fraction of the cost of the stimulus bill.”

• The Permanent TARP, by Peter Wallison

“Current financial reform proposals would establish ‘too big to fail’ as national policy.”

Health Care Reform

• Where Are the Doctors to Implement ObamaCare?, by Timothy White

“A University of California chancellor warns that America could soon look like Massachusetts.”

Law and Politics

• Our ‘Constitutional Moment’, by James Taranto

“The New York newspaperman says our founding document is especially vital today, in an age of expanding state power.”

• Two Ground Zeroes, by Bret Stephens

“A site of mourning became a symbol of defiance and then a metaphor for incompetence.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Economics

• Unintended Consequences, by Greg Mankiw

Finance

• Does Your Optimizer Need a Tune-Up?, by Gene Fama and Ken French

“The realized equity premium for U.S. stocks relative to long-term government bonds has been negative for the 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25-year periods ending in 2008 despite substantially greater standard deviation for stocks. How do I use this information to develop a sensible portfolio based on mean-variance optimization?”

Foreign Policy

• Four Little Words, by Anthony Dolan

“Reagan deliberately confronted criminal regimes with what they fear most: the publicly spoken truth about their moral weakness.”

• Why the Berlin Wall Fell

“From Truman to Reagan, the benefits of moral clarity.”

Health Care Reform

• Has Additional Insurer Consolidation Increased Premiums?, by Austin Frakt

Austin Frakt provides a useful summary of a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper entitled “Paying a Premium on Your Premium? Consolidation in the U.S. Health Insurance Industry”.  Dr. Frakt notes that the “…authors’ main results are that due to increases in insurer concentration: (1) Between 1998 and 2006 premiums increased 2.1 percent. (2) Between 1999 and 2002 physician earnings declined by 2 percent. And (3) over the same period health worker employment declined 2.4 percent.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

The Economy

• Did the Stimulus Work?

Responses to this question are provided by a quartet of academic economists spanning the ideological spectrum, including Simon Johnson (MIT), Mark Thoma (University of Oregon), Russell Roberts (George Mason University, and Jeffrey Miron (Harvard).

• Stimulus and the Jobless Recovery, by Ed Lazear

“Jobs ‘created or saved’ is meaningless. What matters is net job gain or loss, and that means the unemployment rate.”

Health Care Reform

• Supply-Side Ideas, Turned Upside Down, by Greg Mankiw

“Barack Obama is, in many ways, the left’s answer to Ronald Reagan.”  Also see Professor Mankiw’s “Disincentives from Health Reform”, which follows up this New York Times article with a few additional observations!

• It’s $1.5 Trillion, Not $900 Billion, by James Capretta

The author notes that the health-care bill unveiled last Thursday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is being advertised as having an $894 billion price tag over the course of a decade. A more accurate accounting suggests that a more realistic price tag of $1.5 billion.  Similar points are made today in a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled “The Worst Bill Ever”.

Public Policy

• Hot Air, by Steve Landsburg

Professor Landsburg provides some interesting perspectives related to the controversy that is currently brewing in reaponse to the chapter on global warming which appears in (the recently published) book called SuperFreakonomics.

• Will the Internet Survive Its 40th?, by Gordon Crovitz

“The net neutrality battle pits broadband builders against content providers.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Finance and the Financial Crisis

• Efficient Market Theory and the Crisis, by Jeremy Siegel

“Neither the rating agencies’ mistakes nor the overleveraging by financial firms was the fault of an academic hypothesis.”

Foreign Policy

• The Tenacity Question, by David Brooks

“Military experts say that President Obama is intellectually sophisticated, but they do not know if he has the determination needed from a war president.”

• Obama’s Afghanistan ‘drift’, by Charles Krauthammer

“Is there anything he (Barack Obama) hasn’t blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad — everything but swine flu. It’s as if Obama’s presidency hasn’t really started. He’s still taking inventory of the Bush years. Just this Monday, he referred to ‘long years of drift’ in Afghanistan in order to, I suppose, explain away his own, well, yearlong drift on Afghanistan.”

Health Care Reform

• Updating the legislative scenarios: Reply hazy, ask again later, by Keith Hennessey

Here’s how one of my favorite policy wonks (Keith Hennessey) is handicapping the health care reform legislative “process” that is currently going on inside the Beltway…

Math and Statistics

• Number-Crushing: When Figures Get Personal, by Carl Bialik

“Real-Estate Developers Factor In Love of 6 and 8, Fear of Unlucky 4 and 13; What Happened to Floors 40 Through 59?”  Mr. Bialik’s blog entry entitled “

Politics

• We’re Governed by Callous Children, by Peggy Noonan

“When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?”

Public Policy

• Average Marginal Tax Rate, by Greg Mankiw

This blog posting by Professor Mankiw shows how the tax burden, expressed in terms of “average marginal” personal tax rates, has changed over time during the period 1912–2006.

• Why You Can’t Get the Swine Flu Vaccine, by Scott Gottlieb

“U.S. regulations are too cautious. Europe has adopted a more sensible approach.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Climate Change

• Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics, by Bret Stephens

“Global warming might be solved with a helium balloon and a few miles of garden hose …Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man’s neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence. It’s just the same with global warming, which is what makes the clear-eyed analysis in “SuperFreakonomics” so timely and important.”

Economics

• Demand, Supply is an economics rap tutorial, based upon Greg Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics (hat tip to Professor Mankiw!):

• Is the U.S. Economy Turning Japanese?, by Christopher Woods

“Easy money from the Fed hasn’t translated into more consumer lending by banks.”

Health Care Reform

• Public option paradox, from the Free Exchange blog at economist.com

“Not long after that, Senate majority leader Harry Reid announced that the Senate bill will include the public option. Here’s how the Intrade contract on passage of a bill with a public option by year’s end moved on the news”:

Politics and Public Policy

• The Post-Gracious President, by William McGurn

“Whenever he must make a difficult decision, Mr. Obama complains it’s Bush’s fault.”

• The Fatal Conceit, by David Brooks

“The effort to cap executives’ compensation is a good example of overconfidence in government to solve everything.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Behavioral Economics

• Lessons from an Ad Man

Rory Sutherland wows a TED conference audience with a compelling and highly entertaining sixteen minute talk on advertising and aspects of behavioral economics.  I particularly enjoyed the “market research” segment toward the end of the video on Shreddies, Diamond Shreddies, and the Diamond Shreddies Combo Pack. Hat tip to Tutor2u!

Health Care Reform

• How an insurance mandate could leave many worse off, by Tyler Cowen

“Americans seem to like the idea of broadening health insurance coverage, but they may not want to be forced to buy it. With health care costs high and rising, such government mandates would make many people worse off.”

• Why Government Health Care Keeps Falling in the Polls, by Arthur Brooks

“The health-care debate is part of a larger moral struggle over the free-enterprise system.”

• COBRA: Adverse Selection in Action, by Donald Marron
• The ‘Public Plan’ Delusion, by Robert Samuelson

“In the health care debate, the ‘public plan’ is all things to all people. For supporters, it would discipline greedy private insurers and make health coverage affordable. For detractors, it’s a way station on the path to a single-payer insurance system of government-run health care. In reality, the public plan is mostly an exercise in political avoidance: It pretends to control costs and improve access to quality care when it doesn’t.”

Politics

• ‘Man Up, Obama’ and Other Nonsense, by Joe Queenan

“Our liberal op-ed writers don’t think a president from Chicago is tough enough.”

• The ‘Public Plan’ Delusion, by Robert Samuelson

“In the health care debate, the ‘public plan’ is all things to all people. For supporters, it would discipline greedy private insurers and make health coverage affordable. For detractors, it’s a way station on the path to a single-payer insurance system of government-run health care. In reality, the public plan is mostly an exercise in political avoidance: It pretends to control costs and improve access to quality care when it doesn’t.”

Public Policy and Finance

• Learning to Love Insider Trading, by Donald Boudreaux

“Here’s a hot tip: Want to keep companies honest, make the markets work more efficiently and encourage investors to diversify? Let insiders buy and sell, argues Donald J. Boudreaux.”