Stephen Horwitz writes about the problem of Libertarian Contrarianism:#

What seems to have happened is that many libertarians, fueled by the fury of the outsider that comes from having to defend laissez-faire against a dominant intellectual environment that is hostile, transfer that same attitude and energy to other sets of beliefs that are "outsider" beliefs. If "everyone thinks" capitalism is wrong, but you think it's right, why not start to draw the conclusion that other things that "everyone thinks" are true might be wrong? The result? You begin to question the "received wisdom" on slavery and the civil war and then perhaps begin to find yourself associated with defenders of the Confederacy, not all of whom have the purity of your intellectual interest. You begin to flirt with controversial theories on race (see Hoppe's citation of Phillippe Rushton in the 5th note) that many others have branded as racist. You begin to flirt with the anti-Semitic right, conveniently forgetting to mention the Holocaust in a discussion of how many people Hitler killed as compared to Stalin or finding intellectual common cause with the Institute of Historical Review's Holocaust denials. (Note: opposing US aid to Israel or Zionism more generally does not ipso facto qualify as anti-Semitism. It's perfectly possible to be anti-Israel and not anti-Semitic.) And maybe theocracy doesn't seem so awful, because people have misunderstood the role of religion in the defense of liberty. I have also had conversations with self-described libertarians who are skeptics of Darwinism. And, of course, you become a fanatical opponent of "political correctness," without ever even asking how real the phenomenon is and whether it is so antithetical to libertarianism as that opposition suggests.

Andrew Moroz posts the wonderful truth:#

European Men Are So Much More Romantic Than American Men

By Alyssa Lerner
Junior, Boston University

I just got back from a semester abroad in Europe, and let me tell you, it truly was the most magical, amazing experience of my entire life. The French countryside was like something out of a storybook, the Roman ruins were magnificent, and the men, well, European men are by far the most romantic in the world.

[...]

American women studying in Europe are unbelievably easy

By Giovanni Di Salvi

I'm a 25-year-old carpenter living in Rome, and I don't mind telling you that I get all the action I can handle. I'm not all that handsome or well-dressed, and I'm certainly not rich. In fact, my Italian countrywomen could take me or leave me. But that's just fine, because Rome gets loads of tourist traffic, and American co-eds traveling through Europe are without a doubt the easiest lays in the world.

[...]

Alex Tabarrok explains real business cycles.#

Kydland and Prescott show that a recession may be a purely optimal and in a sense desirable response to natural shocks. The idea is not so counter-intuitive as it may seem. Consider Robinson Crusoe on a desert island (I owe this analogy to Tyler). Every day Crusoe ventures out onto the shoals of his island to fish. One day a terrible storm arises and he sits the day out in his hut - Crusoe is unemployed. Another day he wanders out onto the shoals and finds an especially large school of fish so he works especially long hours that day - Crusoe is enjoying a boom economy. Now add into Crusoe's economy some investment goods, nets for example, that take "time to build." A shock on day one will now exert an influence on the following days even if the shock itself goes away - Crusoe begins making the nets when it rains but in order to finish them he continues the next day when it shines. Thus, Crusoe's fish GDP falls for several days in a row - first because of the shock and then because of his choice to build nets, an optimal response to the shock.

Paul Graham describes his language, Arc. (I was there, and this transcript is fabulous, although nearly a year in the waiting!)#

Beyond the primitive operators, which by definition can't be written in the language, the whole of the Arc spec will be written in Arc. As Abelson and Sussman say, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. So if a language is any good, source code ought to be a better way to convey ideas than English prose. [2]

One consequence of this approach is that you could be designing features (or bugs) without even knowing it. If you present a chunk of code and say, this is the language definition, then it may, like any program, do (and in this case, mean) things you didn't intend.

[...]

[2] At the conference, John McCarthy pointed out that a function to invert a matrix might be better described by writing "inverts a matrix" than by giving the source.

That John McCarthy mentioned isn't me, but it's a very cool guy who invented Lisp.

Robert E. Rector and Rea S. Hederman, Jr. report in Income Inequality: How Census Data Misrepresent Income Distribution, from the Heritage Foundation, how the commonly cited data from the U.S. Census Bureau is misleading.#

The official Census Bureau distribution of income by quintile for 1997 is presented in Chart 1. The chart shows that 3.6 percent of total income went to the lowest quintile, while the top quintile received 49.4 percent.

The Census analysis appears lucid and straightforward. However, the Census data are marred by four problems that lead to an overstatement of the level of economic inequality. These problems are:

• The conventional Census income figures are incomplete and omit many types of cash and non-cash income.
• The conventional Census figures do not take into account the equalizing effects of taxation.
• The Census quintiles actually contain unequal numbers of persons, a fact that greatly magnifies the apparent level of economic inequality.
• Differences in income are affected substantially by large differences in the amount of work performed in each quintile, yet these differences in work effort are not acknowledged in Census publications.

[...]

As Chart 6 shows, the Census Bureau represents the top half of society receiving $4.24 in income for every $1.00 received by the bottom half. In reality, the correct figure is $2.28 for every $1.00. The real level of inequality in the economy is effectively half that represented by the conventional Census figures.

Why Scoble is awesome.#

P.J. O'Rourke advises the president on his debate tonight.#

(1) My opponent, Massachusetts senator John Kerry--or, as I like to think of him, Teddy Kennedy with a designated driver . . .

(2) There are two organizations pushing for change in November--al Qaeda and the Democratic party. And they both have the same message: "We're going to fix you, America." On the whole, the terrorists have a more straightforward plan for fixing things. They're going to blow themselves up. Although, come to think of it, Howard Dean did that.

(3) Senator Kerry, what do you mean my administration "lost" 1.6 million jobs? Did Dick Cheney accidentally leave 1.6 million jobs in the Senate men's room or something? Did you find them? Have you got 1.6 million jobs that you're hiding, Senator Kerry? And if you're elected, are you going to give them back?