Read it.

A few weeks ago, Mitt Romney observed that corporations are people. This prompted hysteria on the left, including a video produced by the Democratic Party. But of course Romney was right. A corporation consists of its owners, i.e. shareholders, and its employees–people. It is an elementary principle of law that a corporation can act only through its employees and agents–people. The Democrats’ apparent belief that you can hurt companies without hurting people is absurd. The corporation is merely a legal form in which people do business, now several hundred years old. It is absolutely necessary for any major commercial enterprise because its existence can continue without disruption beyond any one individual’s lifespan. So being “anti-corporation” is equivalent to being pro-medieval.

And once again, ‘progressives’ are shown to be the true reactionaries.

Read it.

Before colonization, the native American population (who actually traveled the farthest from Africa) were the least diverse genetically, the most “clonal” continental group. Their low diversity, especially in immune genes, partly explains why the natives fell so rapidly to smallpox and other introduced diseases. Interestingly, some addressed the problem as Butler’s species did: They kidnapped “outsiders.”

And that’s what got them where they are today. Oh, wait….

Read it.

Unless we’re talking about Joe Biden, of course. And maybe AlGore.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

Blogger friend Irish Cicero had an encounter with one of the persons I think of as “The Hooked”: A waitress, probably angling for a larger tip, commiserating with him by means of such twaddle as “We of the 99.” The bait is gone, the hook has set, she’s not yet fully reeled in but the line is taut. These aren’t individuals anymore for they have willingly given up their individual identity even though they don’t know it. This is a monolith; it’s a blob. It’s everywhere, it’s annoying, it’s maddening, it has all the characteristics of a zombie infestation and it looks unbeatable. Even worse, the closer you study it the more you despair. If these people gave a rat’s rear end about jobs-jobs-jobs, or conservative-versus-liberal, one might nurture some hope about cluing them in. But since they go through life feeling their way around problems rather than thinking their way through them, you might as well argue with a hamster. They are beyond reason, and any one among them is ready, willing and able to fully cancel out your vote. What’s the use of even trying.

And what’s even better is, he appreciates the nature of the Crust, and what must be done.

Your nice old Auntie and your airhead 99-percenter waitress, are motivated by entirely different things. They don’t like seeing people hurt. They’ve blossomed this into a hatred, for no reason more complicated than that hatred is easy. It comes naturally, it comes quick, and once visibly displayed it helps to establish your allegiances. Michael Corleone said “Never hate your enemies, it clouds your judgment,” and this is true. Their judgment is clouded. See, the whole problem is they know more about who they want to have as friends, than about who they want to have as enemies; they don’t really know where to direct the anger.

Read it.

Most of the discussion on income inequality focuses on the relative differences over time between low-income and high-income American households, but it’s also instructive to analyze the demographic differences among income groups at a given point in time to answer the question: How are high-income households different from low-income households?

Megan McArdle calls for a little adult supervision of Congress.

I moderated a panel on infrastructure and jobs at the Bipartisan Policy Center this morning, and one of the topics that came up was an infrastructure bank.  Asked about it, one of the panelists said “what I’d like is to make all the members of Congress write a 100 word essay on what an infrastructure bank is.”  It was a good line, and the audience laughed because it hints at something all too true when it comes to discussing policy: there are a lot of ferocious advocates of policies they can’t explain.

Read it. And watch the video.

Either pretty funny or pretty sad. Or perhaps both.

Read it. And ponder the graphs.

Among the numerous College Know It All Hippie fallacies common in the #OWS movement is the apparent association between having wealth and supporting capitalistic or pro-business policies.  It is true that to a point, wealthier individuals are more Republican than poorer ones in their voting habits, but this relationship starts to beak down as income increases, and at lower levels than most might think.

[graph]

As we can see, Republican voting peaks in the 100-200,000 a year range, and those making 200,000+ mostly voted for Obama (The actual numbers are 52%-46%, approximately the same distribution as the nation as a whole).

Read it.

Of course, scholarly books are still full of footnotes. The prototypic footnote is the source note, providing a citation for each proclamation in the text (early annotations were sometimes called “proofs”). These footnotes range from useful to pedantic, sometimes lending an air of authority, sometimes providing a map of the writer’s path. Legal writing in particular is rife with these footnotes, perhaps an acknowledgment that law is built on laws-past.

But I champion another species of footnote: the wandering footnote. These digressive notes, seeing a sentence that some might consider complete, determine to hijack it with a new set of ever more tangential facts. In the wayward note, the bumps and curves of the author’s mind seem to be laid plain on the paper. I came of intellectual age hearing the author’s sotto voce asides in the philosophy essays I loved. I still recall footnotes that begin, enticingly, “Imagine that . . . ”; “Consider . . . ”; or even, in one of J. L. Austin’s famous thought experiments, “You have a donkey. . . . ” I had the feeling of being taken into confidence by a wise fellow during an erudite lecture, and being told something even more clever and lucid.

Read it.

Apparently not, in the strict sense.

Thackston has identified five dialectal clusters that he classified as follows: “(1) Greater Syria, including Lebanon and Palestine; (2) Mesopotamia, including the Euphrates region of Syria, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf; (3) the Arabian Peninsula, including most of what is Saudi Arabia and much of Jordan; (4) the Nile Valley, including Egypt and the Sudan; and (5) North Africa and [parts of] the … regions of sub-Saharan Africa.”[11] He acknowledged that although these five major dialectal regions were speckled with linguistic varieties and differences in accent and sub-dialects, “there is almost complete mutual comprehension [within each of them]—that is, a Jerusalemite, a Beiruti, and an Aleppan may not speak in exactly the same manner, but each understands practically everything the others say.” However, he wrote,

When one crosses one or more major boundaries, as is the case with a Baghdadi and a Damascene for instance, one begins to encounter difficulty in comprehension; and the farther one goes, the less one understands until mutual comprehension disappears entirely. To take an extreme example, a Moroccan and an Iraqi can no more understand each other’s dialects than can a Portuguese and Rumanian.

Megan McArdle attempts to restore a little perspective.

I spent quite a lot of time on the “We are the 99%” website last night and this morning.  There’s been a considerable amount of carping about it from the conservative side, and to be sure, some of the stories strain plausibility (the percentage of people in the sample who have either taken up prostitution, or claim to have seriously considered doing so, seems rather high, for instance, and as far as I could tell, not a single person on the site had been fired for cause).  Many of the people complaining made all sorts of bad decisions about having children, getting very expensive “fun” degrees, and so forth.

But quibbling rather misses the point.  These are people who are terrified, and their terror is easy to understand.  Jobs are hard to come by, and while you might well argue that any of these individuals could find a job if they did something different, in aggregate, there are not enough job openings to absorb our legion of unemployed.

There’s nothing like not knowing where your next meal is coming from to concentrate the mind. These people have never been in that position, and it scares the shit out of them — perhaps rightly so.

I think it’s hard to read through this list of woes without feeling both sympathy, and a healthy dose of fear.  Take all the pot shots you want at people who thought that a $100,000 BFA was supposed to guarantee them a great job–beneath the occasionally grating entitlement is the visceral terror of someone in a bad place who doesn’t know what to do.  Having found myself in the same place ten years ago, I can’t bring myself to sneer.  No matter how inflated your expectations may have been, it is no joke to have your confidence that you can support yourself ripped away, and replaced with the horrifying realization that you don’t really understand what the rules are.  Yes, even if you have a nose ring.

On the other hand, taxpayer-funded benefits have never been so pervasive and easy to get, so I’m not really sure what their gripe is. Yeah, you won’t be living on the Upper East Side, but you won’t be starving in a doorway, either. Their grandparents didn’t have that assurance.

I’m not sure that this constitutes the seeds of a political movement, however.   For all the admiring talk about bravery and perseverance, it’s not really al that difficult to get young, unemployed people to spend a couple of weeks camping out somewhere.  They have a low cost of time, they’re in no danger, and yes, I have to say it, demonstrating is fun.  No, don’t tut-tut me.  I was at the ACT-UP die-ins, the pro-choice marches, the “Sleep Out for the Homeless” events and the “Take Back the Night” vigils.  It’s fun, especially when you can see yourself on television.  This is not the Montgomery bus boycott we’re talking about here.

Indeed. Compared with facing fire hoses, truncheons, and police dogs, not to mention the very real possibility of firebombs or a shallow grave on some back country road in Mississippi, this is rather a plastic playground revolution.

Of course, in this country a traditional option for young people without prospects is to join the military. (Quit laughing.) I think I can safely predict that, even if they were starving in a doorway somewhere, not one of these kids would even think of it, much less seriously consider doing it … which says, to me, something very sad about our culture these days.

Read it.

One intriguing part of the answer as to why income inequality has not played a big role in current American politics may be supplied by Dallas Federal Reserve economist Michael Cox and Dallas Federal Reserve economics writer Richard Alm in a column in Sunday’s New York Times. They argue that our focus should be on consumption inequality rather than income inequality. The bottom fifth of American households earned $10,000 while the top fifth averaged $150,000 per year. However, spending for the bottom fifth averaged $18,000 per year and the top fifth $70,000 annually.

Note the imbalance between ‘earnings’ and ‘spending’ for the bottom fifth. How do people earning $10,000 spend $18,000? The obvious answer is taxpayer-funded benefits. These are the ‘poor’ over whom there is much hand-wringing among the bleeding hearts.

So, bearing this in mind, if we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1. A similar narrowing takes place throughout all levels of income distribution. The middle 20 percent of families had incomes more than four times the bottom fifth. Yet their edge in consumption fell to about 2 to 1.

So, if they aren’t spending it, what are the rich doing with their money? Hiding it under the mattress? They are, of course, investing it — in various financial investments that create jobs and economic growth. So ‘soak the rich’ doesn’t mean that Algernon has to give up his fifth Maserati, but that businesses don’t get started and unemployed people don’t get employed. This is why Democrat class-warfare winds up hurting us all.

Don Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, rewrites a news story so that it actually tells the truth. The result is amusing. Too bad our ‘journalists’ have the intelligence of green vegetables.

The Obama administration, under fire for not taking a harder line on China over its currencyon American consumers who stubbornly take advantage of good deals offered by Chinese sellers and, allegedly, made even more attractive by Beijing’s monetary policy appears set to move against the Asia export powerhouse on other frontsthese politically unorganized Americans as next year’s U.S. elections approach.

I especially like the way he fisks Mitt Romney, who (for all his success in business) is apparently ignorant of certain elementary principles of economics.

Not that any of the other candidates represent any improvement. Herman Cain, for example, who ought to be able to run the numbers, sticks with his superficially attractive but ultimately useless tax reform plan.

The Other McCain brings up a good point.

It says a great deal that Bush himself condescends to hang out with the enlisted guys who were permanently harmed on his watch.

It says far more that the guys harmed on Bush’s watch really want to hang out with him.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

To be fair about it, “pure” capitalism already saddles us with an endless procession of sad situations in which resources are allocated according to who’s-friends-with-who, rather than what would be best for consumers and other stakeholders. But a centrally planned economy does nothing to fix this, if anything it exacerbates the situation. When you have a free economy and the consumer is in charge, there’s always some corrective force applied to it. It doesn’t win out at the end of the day, true; it doesn’t even win most of the time. But at least the corrective force intensifies as the problem gets worse, and it’s easy to forget that what we see of the problem is really just the remnants of it after the unacceptably odious parts of it have been quietly cleaned up.

A command economy lacks this clean-up device, and so, over time, the problem has to get worse. It can’t do anything else.

For the record, he’s wrong about his understanding of pure capitalism. But he’s spot on if he’s thinking of ‘crapitalism’, and respecting the alternatives.

Read it.

Funny thing about that: So do I.

Gingrich first sought to tie the protests to “left-wing agitators” before calling for the firing of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

He then doubled down, calling on former Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank to be thrown in jail, not anyone on Wall Street. Asked if he actually meant for them to do prison time, Gingrich said he did, alluding to past ethical scandals.

Newt’s as entertaining as Biden, although in a different way. Newt for V-P? It could happen.

Read it.

Christopher Hitchens is always worth reading.

The first thing to say, when reviewing the question of what America should do about those of its citizens who advocate the murder of random numbers of its civilians, is that it is flat-out astonishing to see the debate being conducted at all. Faced with jeering, sniggering, vicious saboteurs who hide from the daylight and pop up on blogs and cheap CDs, calmly awarding religious permission for the capricious taking of life, what do we imagine Vladimir Putin would do? Or the police and security forces of the People’s Republic of China? Or Israel or Saudi Arabia? To ask the question is to answer it.

That says it all; but the rest is interesting, too, so please read it.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

The economics of coaching works like this. Consider tennis. Lots of young people love the game and play for free in the hopes that someday they’ll get good enough to get paid. But even those who do become tournament pros are typically physically washed up by 25 or 30. So, there is a huge supply of potential coaches relative to current tournament pros. Coaching offers them a chance to stay in the game in some fashion, even at reduced pay.

In contrast, in teaching, it’s not clear when the average teacher gets too old for the classroom, but it’s considerably older than when the average tennis pro gets too old for Wimbledon. What is clear, however, is that a lot of teachers get sick of teaching other people’s children and would like to transition into a nice, child-free education job dealing mostly with other grown-ups, especially because the pay isn’t less, it’s the same or even higher. That’s one reason for the huge expansion over the years in the number of staffers and consultants in school districts, most of whom are ex-teachers. Promoting your best teachers (to the extent that any school district knows who their best teachers are) to teach teachers might well hurt students more than help teachers.

The problem with our education system is that we don’t really know what works and what doesn’t, and nobody is willing to experiment with kids to find out.

The problem with teaching is that it’s a lot like being a doctor in the 18th Century. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, was the most celebrated doctor in England. King George III asked him to cure him of his madness. Erasmus, no fool, turned him down.

You see, 18th Century doctors had relatively few ways to actually cure anybody of anything, so their reputations for healing the sick mostly depended upon their skill at “prognosis.” Erasmus Darwin was the best at figuring out which potential patients would likely improve on their own and which wouldn’t. He avoided the latter like the plague, even if they were the King of England. Similarly, nobody knows (or much cares) how good, say, Harvard is at teaching undergraduates. But Harvard is outstanding at prognosis of high school seniors. And that’s what counts at present in education.

Lileks.

I should have to say any more.

Read it.

The minimum wage may be pricing young people out of work because employers are finding it too expensive to give them their first job, Government pay advisers have said.

Gee, whoda thunit.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

Steve Sailer apparently doesn’t like Rick Perry.

Read it.

Would you like to have chimp genes to fight cancer and malaria? Or maybe kudzu genes for antioxidants?

Read it.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

David Gelernter actually has something worth reading.

Jobs was an original, but he was also the latest of a long line of seers all carrying the same message: Technology is design. To be great, technology must be beautiful.

Whatever his formal titles, at Apple and the other companies he created, bought or shook up, Jobs was always designer-in-chief. He knew from the start that his task was to tell engineers, here’s how it should look, sound, feel; here’s how the controls should work; it should be this big and cost that much. Now do it. Let me know when you’re finished.

Read it.

Read it.

Never piss off a librarian.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Personally, I’d rather inflict my low-rent presence on neighbors with more money than me than lord it over even lower rent folks than myself.

Much of the reason for zoning codes demanding large, expensive housing is to keep out low rent folks and their crime-prone, low test score kids.

Read it. And watch the video.

Prior to the War on Poverty, the United States was getting more prosperous with each passing year and there were dramatic reductions in the level of destitution.

But once the federal government got involved in the mid-1960s, the good news evaporated. Indeed, the poverty rate has basically stagnated for the past 40-plus years, usually hovering around 13 percent depending on economic conditions.

Another remarkable finding in the video is that poor people in America rarely suffer from material deprivation. Indeed, they have wide access to consumer goods that used to be considered luxuries – and they also have more housing space than the average European (and with Europe falling apart, the comparisons presumably will become even more noteworthy).

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Ben Dominech has a gimlet eye.

Does Perry have the heft to be president? This is a different question than you may think it is. It’s not about impressing the self-styled gatekeepers (leave them to their Santorum worship) in Washington and New York, who still think Rudy Giuliani has national appeal, have never shot a gun, and have no idea about the difference between a lease and a hunting lease (they also haven’t determined the outcome of a Republican primary since 1976). It’s about the donor community and the national conservative base, which overlaps. This requires different attributes, and more meaningful ones, than the often vacuous checkboxes of the national scene. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan appeals to the base not for its specifics but because it is a plan. It’s an improvement; it’s a sign of seriousness that goes a step further than rhetoric; and it puts a marker in the sand about what he believes economic policy should look like. Perry’s Texas handlers need to understand that no one has paid attention to Perry’s superb acumen in handling environmental regulatory issues over the past decade, for instance – it’s all new to them. Tim Pawlenty gave a series of pretty good policy speeches that went nowhere because he has the personality of reduced-fat cream cheese. Perry has the opposite problem – he has personality out the ears, but the only policy markers that national Republicans have heard thus far are that he loves Texas, Israel, immigrants, and getting some goats for our computer industry. He doesn’t need to be Paul Ryan, nor should he pretend to be. But he needs a plan, and he needs it soon, and it needs to be damn good. There’s an economic policy-only debate coming up on October 11 where Gardasil and immigration will be in the background; Perry should at least tease his economic plan there, and lay it out soon after.

Christopher Howse has standards. How weird is that?

Read it.

The IKEA Effect refers to the tendency for people to value things they have created/built themselves more than if made by someone else – in fact, nearly as much as if an expert had created the same item.

I can attest personally to the power of the IKEA effect.  We actually purchased an entire kitchen from IKEA, which I assembled and installed myself.  And it is a hundred times better than anything professionals could have made!

Read it.

It was a sunny September afternoon at the mayor’s house on East 79^th street and Diana Taylor was talking to the two boisterous Laborador retrievers that she shares with her boyfriend, Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

I guess when you’re as rich as RINO Bloomberg, just having a pre-nup isn’t sufficiently secure. Best just not to get married at all. (That wouldn’t save you from ‘palimony’ in California, but this is New York, the Other Left Coast, which does these things the old fashioned way.)

She was even less sanguine about Obama. “I think that he’s a very intelligent man,” she said carefully. “And he has a lot to learn.”

Her voice took on a sharper edge. “For somebody’s who’s going to come in and be the great unifier—you know, that hopey-changey stuff—it hasn’t worked very well. The country is more divided now than it’s ever been. And he doesn’t appreciate other people and what they do. “

Even RINOs get the blues.

Steve Sailer loves to poke around.

For the last couple of decades, there has been a popular theological concept that every living human being was 100% descended from modern humans who came Out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, so therefore there hasn’t been enough time for evolution to cause any changes among people, so, therefore, Science Proves the complete genetic equality of all human racial groups.

So, what happened to the not-so-modern humans who were around back then, like the Neanderthals? Well, to Prove Racism Wrong, they had to have been utterly exterminated, the victims of a 100% genocide with no living descendants whatsoever. You see, old theories that some of the old non-African humans weren’t completely obliterated were racist, because that would imply that living humans aren’t all identical by descent, so they had to be utterly wrong. So, the old humans had to die. You can’t make anti-racist omelet without exterminating a few lineages.

In reality, it’s not actually a good idea to get too worked up over some theory you hold about the distant past. It’s especially not a good idea to create political/moral/religious dogmas dependent upon some assumption you make about the far past. You never know what somebody might dig up.

Read it.

The diary was put together by a former SAS soldier shortly after the original regiment was disbanded in 1945. He preserved as much documentation as he could, compiling a scrapbook of photographs, operational orders and afteraction reports from its origins in North Africa through Italy, France and the drive on Berlin.

The diary, which weighs 25lb and was bound in leather “liberated” from the Nazis, was locked away for half a century with no one aware of its existence. Shortly before the unnamed soldier’s death a decade ago he handed it over the SAS Regimental Association.

Read it.

Read it.

“Easy for him to say.”

That’s the view of many of America’s millionaires on Warren Buffett’s demand that the rich pay higher taxes. It’s one thing for an 80-year-old philanthropist-investor worth $39 billion to pay a higher tax rate. It’s quite another for a small businessperson just starting out who’s worth a few million.

“There is more of a difference between my financial position as a multi-millionaire and Buffett’s than there is between mine and a guy that makes minimum wage,” one reader told CNNMoney. “Why am I grouped with him and why does he feel he can speak for me?” According to data from Spectrem Group, just 24% of those making $1 million or more a year said that the most equitable tax is a “graduated tax in which those who make more money, pay more.” Nearly half of them supported a flat tax.

Looks like rich people aren’t totally clueless after all.

Joel Kotkin lays it out.

My colleagues at Praxis Strategy Groupand I have looked over data for the period after the economy started to weaken in 2006. Using stats from EMSI, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we compared sectors by growth, and then by average salary.

Not surprisingly “recession-proof” fields such as health care and education expanded some 11% over the past five years. More inexplicably, given its role in detonating the Great Recession, the financial sector expanded some 10%.

Considering the number of government bailouts of firms ‘too big to fail’, it certainly doesn’t surprise me.

But the biggest growth by far has taken place in the mining, oil and natural gas industries, where jobs expanded by 60%, creating a total of 500,000 new jobs. While that number is not as large as those generated by health care or education, the quality of these jobs are far higher. The average job in conventional energy pays about $100,000 annually — about $20,000 more than finance or professional services pay. The wages are more than twice as high as those in either health or education.

Read it.

Six years ago, Senate Finance Committee investigators mounted an inquiry into an exotic variety of nonprofit organization that they feared affluent families were using to warehouse wealth while simultaneously earning themselves lucrative tax breaks.

One nonprofit group singled out for scrutiny was a low-profile organization based in Tulsa. That group, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, later became the biggest investor in Solyndra, the solar company that collapsed last month after burning through a half-billion dollars in taxpayer money.

And this is why the ‘raise my taxes!’ meme is such bullshit. Beyond a certain level, being rich is not about having ready money but about having power, and power can be exercised through a tax-free foundation as readily (and sometimes more readily) than through a fat wallet — and the public relations benefits are far superior. ‘Do this or I won’t give you money’ uses after-tax dollars; ‘Do this or my foundation won’t give you money’ uses pre-tax dollars — and the power exercised is exactly the same.

Read it.

Once again, the Democratic Party’s true nature as the Party of the Rich reveals itself.

Mr. Himes, 45, once benefited from his Wall Street past. His 12-year career at Goldman played well with voters near his Greenwich home during his first campaign in 2008, and he brought in more than $500,000 in donations from the securities and investments industry, nearly $150,000 of which came from individuals at Goldman.

With a neat side part, a sharp jaw and the trim physique of a former Harvard lightweight crew captain, Mr. Himes, a Rhodes Scholar who once modeled for Ralph Lauren, still looks every bit the financial executive. In 2002, he left Goldman to take a job at Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing nonprofit, where he stayed until running for office in 2008.

Read it.

The first full series of scans of the developing adolescent brain—a National Institutes of Health (NIH) project that studied over a hundred young people as they grew up during the 1990s—showed that our brains undergo a massive reorganization between our 12th and 25th years. The brain doesn’t actually grow very much during this period. It has already reached 90 percent of its full size by the time a person is six, and a thickening skull accounts for most head growth afterward. But as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade.

For starters, the brain’s axons—the long nerve fibers that neurons use to send signals to other neurons—become gradually more insulated with a fatty substance called myelin (the brain’s white matter), eventually boosting the axons’ transmission speed up to a hundred times. Meanwhile, dendrites, the branchlike extensions that neurons use to receive signals from nearby axons, grow twiggier, and the most heavily used synapses—the little chemical junctures across which axons and dendrites pass notes—grow richer and stronger. At the same time, synapses that see little use begin to wither. This synaptic pruning, as it is called, causes the brain’s cortex—the outer layer of gray matter where we do much of our conscious and complicated thinking—to become thinner but more efficient. Taken together, these changes make the entire brain a much faster and more sophisticated organ.

This process of maturation, once thought to be largely finished by elementary school, continues throughout adolescence. Imaging work done since the 1990s shows that these physical changes move in a slow wave from the brain’s rear to its front, from areas close to the brain stem that look after older and more behaviorally basic functions, such as vision, movement, and fundamental processing, to the evolutionarily newer and more complicated thinking areas up front. The corpus callosum, which connects the brain’s left and right hemispheres and carries traffic essential to many advanced brain functions, steadily thickens. Stronger links also develop between the hippocampus, a sort of memory directory, and frontal areas that set goals and weigh different agendas; as a result, we get better at integrating memory and experience into our decisions. At the same time, the frontal areas develop greater speed and richer connections, allowing us to generate and weigh far more variables and agendas than before.

When this development proceeds normally, we get better at balancing impulse, desire, goals, self-interest, rules, ethics, and even altruism, generating behavior that is more complex and, sometimes at least, more sensible. But at times, and especially at first, the brain does this work clumsily. It’s hard to get all those new cogs to mesh.

Don Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, takes some time to teach us a little economics.

In his essay that I addressed yesterday, Pat Buchanan writes:

You cannot have a rising standard of living when your highest-paid production jobs are being exported overseas.

I suspect that the above sentence strikes most readers as merely stating an obvious, indeed trivial, truth.  But it’s wrong.  And understanding why it’s wrong – why it’s wrong beyond its use of the familiar yet misleading notion that jobs are “exported” – is necessary to any informed discussion of trade.

Of course, what Buchanan means by writing “your highest-paid production jobs are being exported overseas” is that valuable tasks once done for domestic (say, American) consumers by fellow citizens are now done for domestic consumers by foreigners.  And Buchanan likely agrees that the reason for such a switch of who performs these tasks is that foreigners can now perform these tasks at lower costs than can Americans.

Let’s call the good that high-paid American producers once produced, but are now imported from low-paid foreigners, a “doohickey.”

Americans can now get the same quantity of doohickeys that they value by at least $X per unit – where $X is the price they paid for each doohickey when fellow Americans produced doohickeys – for a price of less than $X.  So Americans as consumers of doohickeys are clearly better off.

Also better off are those American producers who now sell more – or who fetch higher prices for their outputs – because at least some of the money American consumers now save when buying doohickeys is now spent on these other American-produced goods and services.

‘Jobs’ cannot be exported because ‘jobs’ are not things that can be physically moved — ‘jobs’ are temporary arrangements whereby money is exchanged for a service. The reason we purchase services is so that we will be left in a better state once the purchase is completed than before. When the ‘better state’ is the possession of a product, then whether we purchase the product itself or purchase the service that creates the product is a matter of relative price (all else being equal). When we buy a shirt from Sears rather than hire somebody to come to our house and make it for us, the reason is because we can get an adequate shirt at Sears for a lesser price that it would take to have somebody come to our house and make it for us — we are not ‘exporting the job of shirtmaking’ to Sears.

Read it.

Read it.

To use Google+ and Facebook, people yoke themselves to the providers by handing over their data in exchange for use of the services. It’s like a feudal system: the social-networking companies are sustained by the data flooding into them, and gain in power from the exchange. People upload their photos, their messages and other data from their personal life, but the service providers control how that information is presented to the world.

“The users contribute their own content to you for free. You sell it back to them with banner ads put on there. And on top of that, you spy on them to gather profiling data,” says Michiel de Jong, of the Unhosted project to decentralise user data.

THE SKY IS FALLING! Film at 11.

Bryan Caplan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Question for people who think that (almost) everyone should go to college:

Do you also think that (almost) everyone should major in high-paid technical fields like engineering, medicine, and computer science?

If not, why not?

If the college premium is an overpowering reason to go to college, why isn’t the technical premium an overpowering reason to major in a technical field?

If you think (almost) everyone has the brains and work ethic to finish college, why doubt that (almost) everyone has the brains and work ethic to finish an engineering degree?

If you think most or all of the college premium is a treatment effect, not selection, why doubt that most or all of the technical premium is, likewise, a treatment effect, not selection?

Pray tell.

Read it.

The lesson of government waste, whether on $16 muffins or $535 million loan guarantees to solar power companies or $48 billion in “improper” Medicare payments, is one worth relearning every day.

Managers whose budgets do not depend on customer satisfaction and who do not face competitive pressure in the marketplace, will not, on balance, spend their money wisely. Vendors selling to those managers know that price matters much less than it does to, say, Wal-Mart. And anywhere there is political urgency and official involvement high up the command chain, conditions will begin resembling a gold rush.

Read it.

This Labor Day America stands on the brink of an industrial revival. During the next decade millions of Americans will be re-employed in manufacturing. Tens of millions more will be newly employed in jobs supporting manufacturing and serving the needs of manufacturing employees. The financial sector will shrink and the industrial sector will grow. Balance of payments problems will disappear; tax revenues will increase while tax rates go down.

Read it and see whether you think he’s right.

Read it.

No one appears ready to say it, so we will. The United States Postal Service (USPS) is on the verge of default because it has become one of the largest employers of Black people in the world. It’s disproportionately Black job force – which employs, like the local, state, and federal government, a disproportionate amount of Black people – is a burden to generating profits, maintaining a high standard of work ethic, and ultimately, staving off default.

No company – private or public- can go 365Black and not expect a significant shift in productivity, efficiency, and overall skill within that workforce. The USPS has been prostituted out, like so many other government agencies, as a vast employer of Black people due to private companies and corporations continued inability to “make up” work for Black people to perform.

Read it.

Feel free to add your own.

From Benjamin Domenech:

I’ll concede, of course, that Romney is the most electable candidate. Just look at all the elections he’s won.

To which I’ll add: ‘… compared to Perry.’