No Excuse for No Retirement
Dan Hamermesh wrote recently that he doesn’t feel sorry for would-be retirees who lost their savings by bad asset allocation. Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff thinks people aren’t capable of predicting how much they’ll need to save in the first place. So he has developed a “consumption smoothing” program that helps users maintain stable Read More »
Can't We All Just Not Get Along?
No less an authority than my brother called my last post on the transportation stimulus package “spectacularly uninformative.” Fortunately (or unfortunately), this shows I got my message across; I feel pretty uninformed about the transportation program and perhaps you do too. Photo: Artem Finland One problem is that, paradoxically, a major strength of the way Read More »
Can You Pirate Piracy?
We’ve been watching the wandering meaning of the word “piracy” over the last few weeks, as it stretches and shrinks to accommodate the modern world. The re-emergence of honest-to-goodness sea piracy shares headline space with the high-profile trial of Swedish internet pirates and the debate over just what to call “digital piracy.” The Wall Street Read More »
Akhil Amar Got There First
Once again, Catherine Rampell has an interesting Economix post (“Minority Rules: Sex Ratios and Suffrage”) describing a new empirical analysis arguing that “jurisdictions that granted women the right to vote earlier generally had lower concentrations of women.” Why? [M]en had much to lose by enfranchising women. … The relative scarcity of women in the West Read More »
and 
. You can also watch it on 