Blog

Just Give Them Water Filters And Whatnot

Infant and child mortality has fallen precipitously in the last few centuries, and life expectancy has increased dramatically. We have made a lot of progress in the protection of public health, but we are still wasting staggering amounts of life that gets snuffed out early by disease and war. Consider diarrhea, which is an inconvenience […]

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I Watch Things: Movie Night With the Kids

In no particular order, over the last few months. Father Goose. One of my wife’s family’s all-time favorites. I haven’t watched it in years. The kids thought it hilarious, and it’s a very, very good movie. Cary Grant delivers an excellent performance as a crusty and bitter drunkard suddenly surrounded by a very prim and […]

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I Read Things: Niall Ferguson to Narnia

Niall Ferguson, Civilization. I think this is the first Ferguson book I’ve read. He writes beautifully and comprehensively. In the book I’m writing with Deirdre McCloskey—it’s based on McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality—we criticize some of Ferguson’s claims about his “killer apps,” but the book is a pretty solid survey of […]

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I Read Things

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law. What if it turned out cities and neighborhoods aren’t segregated because it just happened that way but because segregation was an official aim of government housing policy for a long time? Rothstein explores the ways in which white homeowners and homebuyers received preferential treatment via federal programs and the […]

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Let The Chips Fall Where They May

The supposed relationship between James M. Buchanan and the forces of “Massive Resistance” to school desegregation in Virginia is at the center of Nancy MacLean’s story in Democracy in Chains. As Phil has pointed out on his blog and as we discuss in our paper, MacLean attempts to link Buchanan to Massive Resistance via the […]

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A Quality YouTube Channel: University of Richmond

The University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies sponsors an annual Summer Institute for the History of Economic Thought with excellent lectures by Deirdre McCloskey and James M. Buchanan (several by Buchanan). Of particular interest are McCloskey’s lecture and Buchanan’s talk “Chicago Thinking: Old and New.” Most students of economic thinking who are familiar […]

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A Bit of Recent TV: Omega

I finished “Salvation.” It’s fun brain candy popcorn tv with a sort-of-cliffhanger ending that makes me think a Season 2 is coming. There’s a nice, healthy dose of skepticism that the government will do the right thing, which makes it satisfying. On the exercise bike in the basement, I watched “Omega,” which is a set […]

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