Appoint and Nominate: How to Fill the Vacancy Atop the CFPB
Last week, I published an op-ed in the Washington Post suggesting an “appoint and nominate” method by which President Obama could make a recess appointment of Elizabeth Warren to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, while still respecting the Senate’s confirmation process. I suggested that the president “should make a recess appointment of Elizabeth Warren and simultaneously nominate Sarah Raskin for the same position.” Read More »
Quitting Time
No one wants to be called a quitter. And absolutely no one wants to be the guy who tells other people to quit … except maybe Stephen Dubner. Today on Marketplace, Dubner explains the virtues of quitting to Tess Vigeland, making the case that people don’t quit enough. Read More »
How to Destroy a University
A colleague elsewhere, who wishes to remain nameless for fear of retribution, has illustrated how easy it is to destroy a university. His is abolishing its economics graduate programs; introductory economics will be taught in sections of 1,000 students; professors do their own purchasing of supplies; and upper-division courses are being sharply reduced in number.
All this is a response to calls for greater efficiency in higher education. Is this really greater efficiency? Or is it a move to a different point on the production possibility frontier, essentially choosing to convert a research institution into a mediocre equivalent of a two-year college? Calls for professors to teach more to save higher-education money have consequences—there ain’t no free lunch here. Of course, too, such policies drive away faculty members who might be interested in doing research. Fortunately, not all public universities are following this troglodyte approach.
Urban vs. Rural Minds: The Differences in Brain Behavior
The Economist reports that city dwellers are at a significantly increased risk of developing anxiety and mood disorders. Evidence from a new study by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a German psychology professor, might point to why.
Urbanites, it turns out, deal with stress differently than rural residents. Meyer-Lindenberg identified a difference in the activity of the amygdalas, with those living in cities having the highest activity in this area of the brain. The amygdala is responsible for memory storage and emotional events, and scientists believe it’s also related to dealing with fear. Meyer-Lindenberg also found that people raised in cities have an off-kilter perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) amygdala link, a condition also present in schizophrenia. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 