David Friedman sticks up for Real Science.

Gartrell’s study was limited to lesbian couples. On theoretical grounds, one could take her result as evidence not that homosexuals are good at child rearing but that women are, in which case it would imply the precise opposite of what she suggests. Insofar as the quote is evidence of anything, it is evidence of bias on the part of the researcher. As anyone familiar with statistical work knows, there are a lot of ways in which a researcher can tweak the design of a study, deliberately or not, to produce the result the researcher wants.

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But I have found a reason to love the Cash for Clunkers program:  it is a fabulous demonstration project for just how utterly pointless government stimulus programs can be.  Stimulus programs tend to be hard to evaluate in our complex economy — sort of like trying to calculate the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings on world climate.  But since cash for clunkers only lasted a few weeks and hit only one industry, we can learn a lot about the effectiveness of government stimulus.

Freeberg understands the dialectic.

I’m just on the light side of 44 now, and in a flash of insight I lately realized that nearly all of the things that have infuriated me beyond all reason…or simply irritated me mildly…have been done by people anxious to prove they’re wonderful. If only people weren’t so desperate to find new ways to prove their wonderfulness, my disposition would be considerably sweetened and I’d probably have a lot more years ahead of me on terra firma right about now.

Preach it, brother.

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The Orthodox year has a rhythm, much like the tide coming in and going out – only this rhythm is undulation between seasons of fasting and seasons (or a few days) of feasting. Every week, with few exceptions, is marked by the Wednesday and Friday fast, and every celebration of the Divine Liturgy is prepared for by eating nothing after midnight until we have received the Holy Sacrament.

It is a rhythm. Our modern world has lost most of its natural rhythm. The sun rises and sets but causes little fanfare in a world powered and lit by other sources. In America, virtually everything is always in season, even though the chemicals used to preserve this wonderful cornucopia are probably slowly poisoning our bodies.

Orthodox do not starve when they fast – we simply abstain from certain foods and generally eat less.

But it is a rhythm – fasts are followed by feasts. The fast of the Apostles begins on the second Monday after Pentecost and concludes on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29. Most of Christendom will know nothing of any of this – that Eastern Christians will have begun a Lenten period while the world begins to think of vacations.

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Ronald Baily actually looks at the science.

However, the researchers found that how students divided up money changed as they became older when it was earned and depended on individual achievements and luck. Most fifth graders (63 percent) remained strict egalitarians, dividing up the money equally, despite the fact that some players earned more money through individual achievement. However, the portion of egalitarians dropped to 40 percent by 7th grade; falling eventually to 22 percent by 13th grade. Conversely, the share of meritocrats rose from 5 percent in the fifth grade, to 22 percent in 7th grade, rising eventually to 42 percent in the 13th grade. A full 42 percent of players in the 13th grade kept more money for themselves because they believed that they have earned it. The authors of the Norwegian study conclude that the meritocratic fairness view increases as the cognitive abilities of children mature. In other words: yes, kids outgrow socialism.

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Yet Another Example of the eternal truth that most poor people are going to wind up poor no matter how much money you give them. They’re poor because of defects in character, not because of some sort of bad luck.

Freeberg is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I’d sure like to know what magical power, what birth star, blood line, what is it exactly? — What’s supposed to make these government regulators so much wiser than the people they’re regulating. I’ve talked and talked and talked to these “we need more regulation” people and none of them have ever been able to tell me.

Jacob Sullum has an excellent piece on maintaining legitimate distinctions.

Libertarians such as Epstein, Bernstein, and Sanchez would like to have prevented this one exception from multiplying. “When you say, this is such a wonderful idea, let’s carry it over to disability,” Epstein says, “you create nightmares of the first order.” But if one thing can be confidently predicted based on the history of U.S. government, it is that exceptions made for one particular purpose will be extended to others, to the point where they become the rule rather than the exception.

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This strikes me as an important development.

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The interesting part is that the New York Times suffers from the same blindness that Peter the Great did: The conviction that change proceeds from the top, and the only question left to answer is what particular technique will produce the best results.

But other people don’t wear those blinkers:

“Competition produces innovation,” said Cliff Kupchan, a director at the Eurasia Group, a global risk-consulting firm based in New York. “I still don’t see a working appreciation of that.”

Read it.

Justin Amash is running for Congress as a Republican in Michigan. He’s currently a state legislator. And as part of his campaign for higher office [UPDATE: He’s been posting votes for a year], he’s posting every one of his votes on Facebook, with a short account of why he voted the way the did.

I’d vote for him, just to have him there as an exemplar.

Arnold Kling wonders where the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage came from.

Freeberg takes a look.

She is brilliant at what she does. But I’ve always had some reservations with what she does.

This is one of the most penetrating analyses I’ve seen in a long time. Read it twice.

Obama doesn’t have it. We haven’t seen Him actually maintain anything, besides relationships; and human emotions being what they are, with relationships you don’t work with the rewards or the wreckage of your work the day before. Obama, from the best information we’ve managed to seize about Him, seems to have spent a lifetime being blissfully insulated from the conditions of things.

Fer chrissakes, we don’t even have a story about a bicycle lovingly maintained, or a household pet. He doesn’t have the “guardian” personality. He is not, by personal inclination, a steward of something. There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate a refinement of the requisite skills, or a personal interest in refining them.

That hits the nail right on the head.

Read it.

Cynthia does good work, and deserves your support. Time presses, so climb on board.

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A golfer has defied odds greater than a lottery win by sinking an incredible two holes-in-one in a row during a single game.

I think I’d rather have the lottery win. But, then, I’m not a golfer.

Read it.

Steve Ballmer has been CEO of Microsoft since 2000. During his tenure, Microsoft came out with Windows Vista, perhaps the most unsuccessful operating system in modern history (Windows ME doesn’t count, since Microsoft’s core customer base was using NT/2000); it tried a “Microsoft inside” strategy in digital music and, when that failed, launched the Zune, which also failed; it watched Firefox (and Safari and Chrome) eat a large chunk of its lunch in Internet browsers, the application most people use more than everything else put together; it launched Windows Live, a marketing strategy with no noun behind it, which completely flopped at whatever it was supposed to do; it got blown away in Internet search to the point where it had to re-launch as Bing, a plucky underdog;  and in mobile phones, which everyone has known for a decade would be the next big thing, it stuck with its bloated, awkward Windows Mobile for far too long, letting everyone (RIM, Apple, Google, and even Palm) pass it by to the point where it has no customer base left. (BlackBerry rules the corporate market, Microsoft’s traditional stomping grounds.) Recently I saw a headline saying that Microsoft is going to try to relaunch Hotmail to make it cool. Really, why bother?

Check it out.

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The Times editorial and other media pronouncements have perpetuated a drastic misreading of history and of government’s role in ending racial discrimination in this nation. This history is far more nuanced than is widely assumed. At the center of the Jim Crow system lay the “Jim Crow laws.” They were indeed laws, i.e., requirements that persons and businesses and government agencies must practice racial discrimination or face civil or criminal penalties. In other words, government had bolstered discrimination instead of suppressing it. For example, the famous 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which endorsed “separate but equal” treatment in railroad travel and eventually in other spheres such as public education, was about whether an 1890 state law in Louisiana requiring segregation was constitutional. The court said it was.

The Jim Crow system did not start in the South. It first arose in the North (although the term dates only from the early 20th century) as a way to deal with free blacks, including ex-slaves. After the Civil War ended slavery in the South, some politicians rallied poor whites and newly freed blacks in support of economic populism, while others sought different forms of accommodation that stopped well short of systematic, state-enforced racial separation. It was only in the last two decades or so of the 19th century—especially in the 1890s—that the Southern states enacted laws to force a level of segregation that had not arisen spontaneously, creating the rigid legal apparatus that some people still remember from the first half of the 20th century. Far from forming the vanguard of segregation, businesses tended to lag, with the railroads particularly notable for their persistence in maintaining a substantial degree of integration until forced by law to halt their practices.

Tyler Cowen is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

How much would the world differ if Harvard reserved a fifth of its entering class for those individuals who showed the most talent for fraud?  I don’t mean that question in a cynical light, it is one genuine way of trying to think about how education adds value to labor market outcomes.

Google has their own way of doing things.

We rely on the Lake Wobegon Strategy, which says only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees.

Another hiring strategy we use is no hiring manager. Whenever you give project managers responsibility for hiring for their own projects they’ll take the best candidate in the pool, even if that candidate is sub-standard for the company, because every manager wants some help for their project rather than no help. That’s why we do all hiring at the company level, not the project level. First we decide which candidates are above the hiring threshold, and then we decide what projects they can best contribute to.

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In a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of the University of Cambridge and the Coma Science Group at the University Hospital of Leige describe their use of fMRI technology to scan the brains of patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. Surprisingly, they found that a small proportion of the patients could understand and respond to a series of questions even though they showed no outward signs of consciousness. This finding is sure to rewrite the textbook on defining and diagnosing disorders of consciousness.

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Sounds like a win-win.

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If you’re a computer programmer you might have found yourself describing a particular problem you are having to a colleague. Many times you’ll never even finish the explanation, or get any feedback before you uncover the solution to your problem. I’ve found that a colleague is not even necessary: you can talk to anything as long as your verbalize your problem.

I’m sure we’ve all had similar experiences.

Read it.

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Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

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Is that portrait not the very image of a smug, supercilious jerk?

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I blame ADD, but that’s me.

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Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

I don’t, but my friends do.

If so, do you tell this person he is “too serious,” or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?

Or perhaps just leave him the hell alone? (Nah, can’t have that.)

“It is very difficult for an extrovert to understand an introvert,” write the education experts Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig.

That’s because extroverts are a bunch of clueless assholes. Just sayin’.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Read it.

Reesa Brown is the Significant Other of Stevn Brust, and is recovering from cancer surgery.

Steven Brust is one of my Recommended Writers (see sidebar on the right), and one of the best living writers of the English language.

Take whatever action you think is appropriate.

Megan McArdle cuts through the fog.

Meyerson identifies a lot of the procedural barriers that I frequently talk about–the bidding and environmental safeguards that make federal projects very slow to get off the ground.  But perhaps unsurprisingly, he doesn’t really explore a huge barrier to a WPA-type jobs program:  public sector unions.  They are not going to let you hire a bunch of cheap workers and run crews without civil service protections.

Just as generals famously prepare to fight the last war, governments prepare to handle the last crisis.

That anyone using the phrase “And I’m, like,….” is to be summarily executed.

It would make the world a better place. Really, it would.

The Wall Street Journal hits a sore spot.

Steve Sailer reviews the big guy.

Herself and I saw the movie last night and had a great time. Just sayin’.

Check it out.

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And rich people, who early adopters tend to be.

Dymphna at Gates of Vienna attempts a response.

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He’s everywhere! He’s everywhere! (Oh, sorry, that’s Chicken Man….)

Charlie Stross has some interesting thoughts.

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit.

Mark Freeberg has a pretty good list.

Read it.

Steve Sailer is on a roll.

David Brooks’s latest NYT column, “The Limits of Policy,” continues his pattern of picking up on my ideas, but expressing them gingerly enough to keep his job. There is a lot of good stuff in here, but enough Crimestop, too, so he doesn’t get Stephanie Graced.

Read it.

Really, that’s about all you did for us — gave us a lecture hall, gave us an arrogant bastard to listen to, and gave us a room full of computers we could use sometimes, and you gave us a degree that employers look at and say “This guy knows how to write reports. Amusing.” And I will be paying for this privilege until I am 51 years old.

Whenever I get a ‘give us money’ message from one of the three institutions from which I hold a degree, I always write ‘BITE ME’ on it in large black maker and send it back in the convenient reply envelope. That quiets things down for about six months.

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First, the meritocracy is based on an overly narrow definition of talent. Our system rewards those who can amass technical knowledge. But this skill is only marginally related to the skill of being sensitive to context. It is not related at all to skills like empathy. Over the past years, we’ve seen very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating.

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A society is formed by the voluntary bonding of individuals into overlapping, ever-changing groups whose members strive to serve each others’ emotional and material needs. Government — regardless of its rhetoric — is an outside force that cannot possibly replicate societal bonding, or even foster it. At best, government can help preserve society — as it does when it deters aggression from abroad or administers justice. But in the main, government corrodes society by destroying bonds between individuals and dictating the terms of social and economic intercourse — as it does through countless laws, regulations, and programs, from Social Security to farm subsidies, from corporate welfare to the hapless “war” on drugs, from the minimum wage to affirmative action. On balance, the greatest threat to society is government itself.

And that is libertarianism in a nutshell.

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When reading science fiction, I refuse to accept as credible any alien species that isn’t at least as strange as the Japanese.

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Here is what really happened: there was a bubble in housing prices. The bubble was mostly the result of government policy–loose money, combined with pressure on banks to make bad loans to unqualified home buyers. It all worked for a while because Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, under the leadership of Congressman Barney Frank and others, created a secondary market for shaky mortgages. Goldman Sachs participated in this market, downstream, along with many other players. But the whole thing wasn’t an accident or a conspiracy, it was government policy. The home price bubble could have only one possible result. All bubbles burst–there is nothing else they can do–and the bursting of a bubble is always painful. The whole disaster that began in 2008 was the inevitable result of government policy, which is why Senators are so anxious to pass the buck to Goldman Sachs.

I’m not a particular fan of either Goldman Sachs or Congress, but today’s hearing confirms that, given a choice, I’d rather have Goldman Sachs regulating Congress than Congress regulating Goldman Sachs. Goldman’s employees are much smarter, considerably more honest, and far more likely to have my interests at heart.