Julie Leung: "What seems silly to me is that for those who believe in Jesus, Christmas and Easter are every day. Why make lots of effort for special celebration two days a year over truths that should be in our lives the other 363, holiday or no?"#

LanguageHat writes about all the languages of the European Union.#

From an article in the BBC:

Twenty languages gives a total of 190 possible combinations (English-German, French-Czech, Finnish-Portuguese, etc), and finding any human being who speaks, for example, both Greek and Estonian or Slovene and Lithuanian is well-nigh impossible

Apparently they haven't met my teacher, Lee K. Riethmiller, who knows all those languages and more.

MetaFilter links to Music for America's Reality and Politics, a video about George W. Bush.#

Micha Ghertner writes about Bryan Caplan's paper, Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist.#

An interesting comment from the paper:

The contributions of econometrics to economics are similarly meager - particularly because econometrics has "crowded out" traditional qualitative economic history. The popularity of econometrics has made it very difficult to do research in any period lacking convenient "data sets"; it has also enforced an uneasy silence about any topic in economic history (like ideology) that is difficult to quantify. When simple econometrics failed to yield universal agreement among informed economists, this merely provided the impetus for econometric theorists to supply increasingly complex estimators and other tools. Truly, this is a case of looking for car keys underneath the streetlight because it is brighter there. The root cause of disagreement is simply that causation and correlation are different, yet almost everyone tends to interpret a correlation as causal if they find the results plausible, and as spurious if they do not.

And, Micha's idea about Mathematics and Econometrics in Economics:

Economists love to talk about how licensing for doctors and lawyers is a form of monopoly power: doctors and lawyers don't need to be licensed to protect consumers as much as they need to be licensed to protect their own wages. By making it more difficult for people to become and remain doctors and lawyers, these two groups shield themselves from further competition, and by reducing the supply of labor, they increase their own wages.

But then I started thinking: if this is true for doctors and lawyers, shouldn't it be true for other highly educated fields as well? Why should economists be immune from their own criticism? Perhaps the continued use of complex mathematics and econometrics even in the face of mediocre results is the method by which economists make it more difficult for the marginal student to enter the field, thereby protecting themselves from further competition. Further, this protects economists from competition with other social scientists, like sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and philosophers, who do not need and do not have the mathematical background necessary to decipher and challenge the work done by economists.

Candice writes on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as Frankenstein. An interesting read.#