Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Shannon Love Delocalization
versus
Relocalization
It does make me wonder if we could create a distributed alarm system that might alert people that were far enough removed from the epicenter. It wouldn’t be useful for small quakes but for big ones it might give people enough warning to do some good (assuming the system wasn’t swamped by false alarms) .
On this Reason post [h/t Instapundit] about possible serious political warping of the “stimulus”spending, commenter nate made an interesting claim:
I work in a federal agency that had a good portion of stimulus cash and was part of the team that picked projects to get funds. We really didn’t look at unemployment in the area. Our main criterion was whether the project had been designed and engineered to a point that we could get construction going pretty quickly. Once we set out our list, we sent it up to OMB. They knocked some stuff out and changed it up some, but for the most part the final list looked like what we sent them. I doubt politics had too much to do with the selection of projects.
I actually think this is very likely. As much as I would gain emotional satisfaction from the idea that perfidious Democrats systematically channeled hundreds of billions of dollars to their cronies in old style big city machine corruption writ large…
… I just don’t think they’re that competent.
Instead, I think the asymmetry could largely result from the type of projects that nate and his colleagues were primed to fund. They didn’t fund projects because the projects fulfilled an important need. Neither did they fund projects that local areas could not afford and therefore had never started. Instead, they funded projects based solely on how far along the projects already were in their development.
So, I’m listening to the Dropkick Murphy’s version of Finnegan’s Wake (best version ever) and it struck me that I really don’t understand what triggers the fight that spills the whiskey on Finnegan.
The relevant lines are:
His friends assembled at the wake
And Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch,
First they brought in tea and cake
Then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch.
Biddy O’Brien began to cry
“Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see?
“Arrah, Tim, mavourneen, why did you die?”
“Ah, shut your gob” said Paddy McGee!
Then Maggy O’Connor took up the job
“O Biddy,” says she, “You’re wrong, I’m sure”:
Biddy gave her a belt in the gob
And left her sprawlin’ on the floor.
And then the war did soon engage
‘Twas woman to woman and man to man,
Shillelagh law was all the rage
And the row and the ruction soon began.
Is Biddy O’Brien saying that Finnegan doesn’t look dead and Paddy McGee takes offense at the raising of false hope? (Back in the day, it wasn’t always evident that people were dead. Typhoid in particular produced a paralysis that could be mistaken for death.)
Does Biddy O’Brien punch Maggy O’Connor just because O’Connor gainsaid her or is there some subtle insult implied?
I know we Irish are quick to fight but I think there is more to the story. Anybody know?
Tim Cavanaugh at Reason, observes that the peak of the dot-dom bubble was reached ten years ago today. The dot-com bubble and other technology bubbles are often held out as examples of the irrational nature of market economies by those who think they could do a better job of running the planetary economy than the rest of us can.
This is myth. Booms and busts represent two equal and necessary phases of technological development. A bust looks ugly but so does the birth of child. The busts are every bit as necessary as the booms and every bit as good for the general society and economy.
