Google Reader Flush

Cleaning out my Google Reader. Boy was it getting clogged.

• Robin Hanson: skip cancer screening as it doesn’t reduce mortality.
• Tyler Cowen notices extortion-by-proxy, which he calls ‘the public as billy club fallacy’: The reality is that the public does not respond to most events, or most changes in the income distribution, as the intelligentsia likes to think it should, or will.
• Having switched ‘careers’ perhaps 2-3 times, and worked towards at least two credentials I’m not actually using, I am disposed to sympthize with dissention’s claim that credentialism will destroy the economy.
• Arnold Kling: One way to think about the financial crisis is that it consisted of a bubble, a bailout, and a cover-up. Very close to my explanation (=that there was a pyramid scheme, and it collapsed).
• Dr. Frank describes the way how things used to sound like, as only he can.
• Hard to argue with Eric Falkenstein’s description of traders: Traders supposedly described in the article are not like day traders, more like bookies who make money off the vig, and have little insight about ‘true value’ but usually a lot of franchise value in their brand or network of contacts, which is why they aren’t as smart as they would be if they were simply price-taking market wizards.
• A good defense of flawed giants.
• The Forgotten Failures of the Peace Corps, via EconLog.
• Why Financial Regulation is Doomed to Fail, via EconLog again.
• Foseti on the official narrative of the crisis.
• Ann Althouse on the two-income trap.
• As happens from time to time, Matthew Yglesias is absolutely spot-on 100% right when he points out that the planet is a place for people to live:
  

  The planet is a gigantic roughly spherical chunk of rocks that can easily survive whatever level of greenhouse gas emissions or whatever else we care to pump into the atmosphere. The big picture ecological threat is a threat to human beings, and to the continued existence of ecological conditions that are conducive to human flourishing. Radical population reduction would sharply reduce the quantity of anthropogenic ecological impacts, but to what end?

  Well said.

• Thoughtful discussion of ‘corporations are people’ by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at The American Scene.
• Norman Geras on the contrasting views the Smarterati hold on Libya vs Iraq.
• The myth of the Indian environmentalist.
• Whiskey doesn’t see good things in Apple’s post-Jobs future. I hope he’s wrong (I usually do).

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