San Francisco, City of Bans, Edition No. 3
First came a de facto ban of Happy Meals; then a proposal for a ban on circumcisions; now comes a proposal to ban the sale of just about every living animal, including goldfish. From the L.A. Times:
Read More »Yes, goldfish. And guppies, gobies, gouramies, glowlight tetras, German blue rams. No fish, no fowl, no reptiles, no amphibians, no cats, no dogs, no gerbils, no rats. If it flies, crawls, runs, swims or slithers, you would not be able to buy it in the city named for the patron saint of animals.
Taking Lab Rats Seriously: The Case Against (Most) Animal Testing
Billions upon billions of animals are used every year for the purposes of scientific experimentation. It’s actually hard to think of another practice that’s as commonplace as it is controversial (biotechnology, perhaps?). It goes without saying that many of these experiments are a waste of time and resources. The NIH, for example, recently spent about $4 million exploring how the menstrual cycles of monkeys were influenced by cocaine, meth, and heroin. Other animal-based experiments, however, appear to have genuine utilitarian value, contributing useful information to our knowledge of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and several cancers. Delve into this issue and you’ll find that only one thing is certain: clear answers aren’t forthcoming.
I generally believe that animal experimentation is a morally flawed way to accumulate scientific knowledge. That said, I plead agnosticism when it comes to rare cases of direct benefit to human life. I’m sure that if one of my children were afflicted with a life threatening disease and experimentation on monkeys had a plausible chance of finding a cure, I’d reluctantly support that research. As much as I’d like to be consistent on this issue–as I’m able to be with, say, my diet–I’m afraid I must take convenient refuge in Emerson’s saying about foolish consistency and little minds. As I said, nothing about the morality of animal experimentation is easy. Read More »
The Fed’s $1 Billion Stash of Unwanted Coins
The folks over at NPR’s Planet Money have a great piece today on the stash of unused dollar coins that’s piling up at the Federal Reserve. Back in 2005, Congress passed a law ordering the Fed to mint a series of dollar coins honoring the presidents. The plan was to wean Americans off paper bills. It hasn’t exactly worked. There are currently about 1.2 billion dollar coins sitting unused in Federal Reserve vaults. The program has cost $300 million so far, and is scheduled to run through 2016.
Stimulus Package Analysis: Which Type of Spending Created The Most Jobs?
Bruce Sacerdote and James Feyrer, both of Dartmouth, have produced a paper that looks at how the stimulus package (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) affected employment, and which type of spending had the most (and least) amount of impact. It’s among the first detailed analyses of employment and earnings effects from the stimulus that uses actual employment outcomes. Here’s the abstract (full version here): 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 