Links Post: Narcissus Edition

Narcissus was supposedly so taken by his own image reflected in the surface of a pond that he starved to death.  I don't need a pond; I have the google!

1.  Interesting piece on "liberal bias" in academics, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.  Author is kind enough to quote me....

2.  Article by the amazing Rob Christensen, on the Gov Debate in NC.  Author is kind enough...

3.  When this video came out, from Learn Liberty, about majorities, I got a number of emails, asking why I didn't say anything about gay marriage.  But....I already had, four months earlier.  C'mon, people, the google is your friend!

4.  Finally.... a giant Munger family conspiracy?  Really?

Mr. Rajoy gets something right

And that something was,"España no es Uganda".

No mountain gorillas, no chimps, no tree-climbing lions, no future for their young people, a worse credit rating, Spain is indeed quite distinct.

 Hey Mariano! Want to know something else Spain isn't anymore? Spain.


 Hat tip to Matt Y, who perhaps not surprisingly has a different take.

He Lied and Said He was a ... Lobbyist

Rep. Lee is married, and 46. And a Congressman.

But he lied and said he was single, 39, and a lobbyist.

The woman on Craigslist was not impressed.

Reminds me of the story about the economist. Mom was coming to visit, and economist made his friends promise NOT to tell mom he was an economist. "She would be so embarrassed, so don't tell her! She thinks I play piano in a whorehouse!" You can see why saying you were a congressman was even worse. In effect, Rep. Lee said that he was an economist.

@mattyglesias says: "Not sure I understand what wrongdoing Rep Lee has committed." Dude! Being a pathetic idiot is not illegal, but it is certainly embarrassing. Congressman gots to go.

From the bathroom of Procrustes

Here's an aphorism way better than any that came from his bedroom:

(not so) Pro-Bono

The Guardian absolutely eviscerates The Edge's sidekick:

Bono's ONE campaign had blitzed the New York media with fancy gift boxes. These contained several items, from designer water bottles to $15 bags of Starbucks coffee, as well as information explaining that poverty-stricken African children live on less than $1.25 a day – "about the cost of the cookie in this box".

To which the only reasonable rejoinder would seem to be: "Then stop spending your money on biscuits for journalists."

But let's not be facetious. Naturally, naturally, the business of activism is more complicated than that, and indeed, ONE has since been forced to remind confused civilians that it is an advocacy organisation and not a grant-making organisation. This became necessary after the New York Post revealed that in 2008, the most recent year for which tax records are available, ONE took $14,993,873 in donations from philanthropists, of which a thrifty $184,732 was distributed to charity. More than $8m was spent on executive and employee salaries.

But wait, there's more:

Bono is adept at holding two contradictory positions in his own mind. Do consider his endless lobbying of the Irish government to earmark more cash for said MDGs, despite having shifted part of U2's tax affairs to the Netherlands to avoid paying even the ludicrously reduced rates Ireland affords to artists. Has he not heard that the money in the Irish exchequer's coffers comes from taxes, paid by the sublebrity likes of nurses and teachers and bricklayers and so on?

And I thought the English and the Irish were getting along now.

Onions

People, VV Chari has 'em!

Check out his recent testimony at the sausage factory.

Here's the punch line:

"I would argue that the United States devotes shamefully little to economic research. For example, the NSF's budget for economics is a pitiful $27 million out of which $2.6 million goes to the worthwhile activity of supporting the Panel Study on Income Dynamics.

Twenty five million dollars for an activity that is deemed fundamentally important by the people of the United States?

Out of that 25 million dollars, my best estimate is that only about 10 per cent goes to macroeconomics. Compare $2.5 million to an overall NSF budget of $6 billion or to the federal government support of basic research of roughly $30 billion.

I should emphasize that, in my judgment, the NSF's peer review process in economics is exceptionally fair and thoughtful. Expanding resources to the NSF's economics program will surely result in much better economic research and will result in very little waste."

Wow, only 27 million "pitiful" dollars for an activity that the "people of the United States" consider to be "fundamentally important", i.e. DSGE modeling!

The horror!

People, he's basically using the crisis to argue in favor of more summer money!

If you look up onions in the dictionary, all that should be there is this:

Yikes (NBA edition)

“I spoil a lot of people with my play. When you have three bad games in seven years, it’s easy to point them out.”

--LeBron James


Wow, people. As Wojo points out, that is not exactly what you want to hear from the league MVP after he's thrown away home court advantage and possibly his team's season in the second round of the playoffs.

Robert Shiller: "I burst the housing bubble"

Yes, people, as we sit and wait for the next bubble to arrive and save us, we finally can figure out who to blame for the untimely bursting of the last one: Robert Shiller!

It must be true, he says so his own self:

"In May 2005, I included in the second edition of my book, “Irrational Exuberance,” a new data series of real United States home prices that I constructed, going back to 1890. I was amazed to discover that no one had published such a long-term series before.

This data revealed that the home price boom was anomalous, by historical standards. It looked very much like a bubble, and a big one. The chart was reproduced many times in newspapers and magazines, starting with an article by David Leonhardt in The New York Times in August 2005.

In short, a public case began to be built that we really were experiencing a housing bubble. By 2006 a variety of narratives, taken together, appear to have produced a different mind-set for many people — creating a tipping point that stopped the growth in demand for homes in its tracks."

I wish I could say I was making this stuff up, but it's all right there in black and white.