Broback's Blog

…and buttresses my opinion that retirement may be best enjoyed later in life. There’s been a ton of discussion online of late regarding the lack of a decent ROI provided by many four-year degrees. This recently from the New York Times: Young graduates who majored in education and teaching or engineering were most likely to […]

[Read more →]

In his somewhat misleadingly titled post, my friend Steve breathlessly reports that a small survey of 299 college professors shows them to mostly vote Democratic. Whaaaa…? College professors mostly “D”s? Stop the presses(!?) While I suppose it’s mildly interesting those surveyed happen to be professors of Economics, they are hardly representative of the 15,000 economists […]

[Read more →]

Nothing like a little perspective… World Bank economist Branko Milanovic provides us with evidence which appears to refute the romantic worldview that 1930’s dustbowl poverty is pervasive in the world’s most prosperous country. Some of us have been running this chart/distribution natively in our brains, glad to see the empirical analysis backs us up. I […]

[Read more →]

This common, romantic statement recently surfaced in a post by J. Bradford DeLong and aligns with my other favorite, “the government is us.” Apparently (unlike the University of Washington) they don’t teach Public Choice classes at Berkeley. If they did, DeLong would likely hold a more enlightened view thanks to the work of Tullock, Buchanan […]

[Read more →]

My friend Steve finds a good quote from Einstein. I’ve been cataloging many of the professor’s statements over the years, as they are useful when illustrating the profound limitations of “book smarts” — but had not run across this one. It’s a keeper: “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” My […]

[Read more →]

There’s a lot of discussion in the blogsphere regarding how Keynesian stimulus is proving to be politically impossible. They assertion is Keynesianism would work great, if only we had enough political courage to do it right. (“right” meaning spend WAY more than a measly 2.8 trillion.) Krugman says (and Christina Romer agrees) that we just […]

[Read more →]

Can anyone help me? I have been feeling bad about how people who defined themselves as “Progressive” and how they did so poorly on this test of “economic enlightenment.” Questions and results from the related survey are presented below. I would assert that the survey was unfair as it tested what most would call “mainstream” […]

[Read more →]

Sat next to a very nice and talented artiste/wordsmith at dinner tonight. In addition, this person was also a big fan of Michael Moore. As one could expect, the usual paradoxical inverse relationship between hours spent in academic/formal study of Macroeconomic theory and strength/rigidity of position on optimal resource allocation shone brightly. As one could […]

[Read more →]

There’s been a lot of discussion about how the “Blue” states seem to be suffering the most in this fiscal mess. Articles and posts like The Blue State Budget Crisis, Why is it that most of the states with massive budget problems are run by Democrats?, and Fiscal mess in blue states a problem for […]

[Read more →]

It’s a cultural thing.

[Read more →]