For a good summary of the arguments for and against bailing out the auto industry, see Becker and Posner. It's rare to see them disagree; usually they take the same side of an argument.

I am against bailing out the auto companies. Bankruptcy should mean that you've run out of money and you should try doing something else. I am for unemployment and trade assistance of fired GM employees. There's no reason to give more money to companies that continually made bad decisions and have lost market share.

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How can you identify good teachers before you hire them? Could you or I design a written exam that would weed out the good teachers from the bad, or does the test medium make that task impossible?

How different would schools look if you designed curriculum to make students smarter, not more knowledgeable? Especially if you could teach students to overcome their natural cognitive biases.

Why has no one started a company hiring amazing teachers and getting them to teach video lectures to thousands of students at a time? We have the technology to make it work. I feel like teaching shoud be scalable, obviously you have to have someone watch the people in the classroom. Yet most people would reject this idea outright. If the teachers are good enough (if you're picking the best ones in the country) the kids will pay attention, even if he's thousands of miles away.

Economists teach Ricardian equivalence, the idea that when government spends money, someone must pick up the tab. Is it fair to vote to issue bonds now when the people who will pay off the bonds thirty years down the road are not yet old enough to vote on the matter? For that matter government borrowing Ricardian equivalent, or does it generate enough extra revenue to pay for itself later?

Does pessimism cause migraines?

Is it right, or desirable, that markets are so big now that one fake press release can wipe out $2.5 billion in net worth? The article is old but this happened again recently with a recycled United Airlines article.

Why do schools blow so much money on sports programs? Sports are meaningless. Yet if someone at your school can cure cancer, they've done amazing good for the world.

The University of Chicago in the 60's and 70's had the absolute smartest economics and finance people in the world - Milton Friedman, Myron Scholes, Friedrich von Hayek, Ronald Coase, Gary Becker, Eugene Fama, George Stigler, and more. Does such an amazing concentration of people exist in any field today? Could government get such a group to assemble (isn't this a public good)?

Portfolio theory suggests that it's very difficult to outperform the market as a whole, thus you should buy a whole bunch of index or no-load mutual funds and hold them for a long time. Yet when you buy an index fund you are buying a small portion of thousands of firms. If more and more people are buying index funds, is shareholder responsiblity/oversight diluted?

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“I do feel bad about that trophy I threw in the Mississippi, because you don’t want to pollute an important, historic waterway,” he said. “But I don’t want any of those trophies. I appreciate the gesture, but a coaching award distracts from the essence of a coach’s job, which is to educate the students. You can only justify the existence of a team at a college campus if being on the team benefits the athletes’ educational experience."

That is Tom Donnelly, the track and field coach at Haverford, who represents everything I believe about coaching and athletics at the college level. I'll write more about collegiate athletics when I have more time.

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Fascinating Michael Lewis article about three guys who shorted every financial firm involved in the subprime crisis going back to 2004. Hat tip to EconLog.

Dennis Litsky, founder of the Met Schools, talks about his vision for school.Three days a week are in the classroom and two at internships in the community. The school has much higher attendance, graduation, and college acceptance than the surrounding Rhode Island schools. More here.

New movie from the director of Trainspotting called Slumdog Millionaire, about an Indian slum child who wins a million dollars on a game show.

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This is a knee-jerk reaction, but this report suggests we could work miracles for millions of hungry people with a fraction of the amount of money we are spending on trying to resuscitate the banking system. Why are we so unwilling to spend money on those living in abject poverty, while we are willing to commit trillions of dollars to a government bailout and recapitalization of the financial system?

In general Americans don't like sending their tax money abroad. Also, the public thinks a much higher percentage of the budget is used for foreign aid (15-20 percent) than is actually used (a fraction of one percent); it's amusing to ask strangers how much of the US budget goes to foreign aid and hear the responses. Much of the money that's been lent in the bailout is expected to come back to the government, in dividends or loan repayments. Money spent on hunger has dividends (more crops, healthier population, fewer deaths) but these are not benefits that will be paid back to the US taxpayer any time soon.

Furthermore this is not an either/or situation. The money that the government spends on the bailout is not money that would otherwise be spent on food programs (although increased government spending/taxation may reduce charitable giving).

The bailout crisis is "recent" - it's been in the news lately. While the lack of food in third world countries is also an urgent crisis, it's been an urgent crisis for years and will continue to be a crisis for at least another decade.

Despite the complaints of the US people, from a utilitarian perspective our money is being grossly misspent. Everyone knows our real wealth will fall and the economy will slow down, painfully. And by pain I mean companies will go bankrupt, Americans will lose jobs, and homes will lose value. Our stomachs should not suffer as much.

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I'm going to sit up straight in class, stand up straight and stop rolling my head forward. Good posture projects confidence and makes me more alert. It will help with social dancing and staying low in a stance in basketball. It's also difficult, but once I form the habit I won't have to worry

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This tool, Fundrace 2008 at Huffington Post, allows you to search for political campaign contributions by name, zip code, employer or occupation. Within one minute of navigating to the site, I knew exactly how everyone in my neighborhood donated. This provides a glimpse at how easily our personal information will be searchable within a couple of years. You can search for campaign donations along a number of different variables. I can imagine an even better tool than this for searching campaign contributions in the near future. Here is a list of how CMC professors donated money.

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I recently transferred to Claremont McKenna College from the University of Pennsylvania and have made several changes to my daily routine that greatly improve my quality of life. I list four. - Planning Ahead. I frequently ate and hung out alone at Penn because I failed to coordinate plans with others. Meals and studying are some of the best times to get to know other students (Drinking isn't the best time; conversation when partying is invariably superficial) and I missed out on a lot of interaction time at Penn through apathy. Seeing Friends. CMC is one tenth the size of Penn and I see friends regularly while walking around or eating meals. This is really important. It's a great way to quickly catch up and/or make plans for later. Lifting Weights. I am putting some muscle on my lean frame. Working out feels great and my clothes fit better across the chest and shoulders. I am also getting stronger. A good weight training program takes about six hours per week. Not Leaving Projects to the Last Minute. I find that schoolwork will always expand or contract to fill the amount of time you have to complete it. At Penn this often meant late nights or early mornings the night before papers are due. I am doing much more with my time now and can't afford a sleepless night. My solution is simple but draws laughter from other students. Whenever a paper is coming up I write out a $50 check to the National Rifle Association, PETA, Focus on the Family or another organization I dislike and give it to a friend I know will mail it. I tell him/her that if I don't email them a copy of the finished paper by midnight, they should mail the check. This tactic is amazingly effective; I get the work done during productive hours and I still get to sleep those nights.

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I tried to find this scene on YouTube, but had no luck. Apparently my favorite scene is not the same as everyone else's. From one of my favorite movies, Good Will Hunting:

WILL

When did you know she was the one?

SEAN

October 21, 1975. Game six of the

World Series. Biggest game in Red

Sox history, Me and my friends slept

out on the sidewalk all night to get

tickets. We were sitting in a bar

waiting for the game to start and in

walks this girl. What a game that

was. Tie game in the bottom of the

tenth inning, in steps Carlton Fisk,

hit a long fly ball down the left

field line. Thirty-five thousand

fans on their feet, screamin' at the

ball to stay fair. Fisk is runnin'

up the baseline, wavin' at the ball

like a madman. It hits the foul pole,

home run. Thirty-five thousand people

went crazy. And I wasn't one of them.

WILL

Where were you?

SEAN

I was havin' a drink with my future

wife.

WILL

You missed Pudge Fisk's homerun to

have a drink with a woman you had

never met?

SEAN

That's right.

WILL

So wait a minute. The Red Sox haven't

won a World Series since nineteen

eighteen, you slept out for tickets,

games gonna start in twenty minutes,

in walks a girl you never seen before,

and you give your ticket away?

SEAN

You should have seen this girl. She

lit up the room.

WILL

I don't care if Helen of Troy walked

into that bar! That's game six of

the World Series!

Sean smiles.

WILL

And what kind of friends are these?

They let you get away with that?

SEAN

I just slid my ticket across the

table and said "sorry fellas, I gotta

go see about a girl."

WILL

"I gotta go see about a girl"? What

did they say?

SEAN

They could see that I meant it.

WILL

You're kiddin' me.

SEAN

No Will, I'm not kiddin' you. If I

had gone to see that game I'd be in

here talkin' abouta girl I saw at a

bar twenty years ago. And how I always

regretted not goin' over there and

talkin' to her. I don't regret the

eighteen years we were married. I

don't regret givin' up counseling

for six years when she got sick. I

don't regret being by her side for

the last two years when things got

real bad. And I sure as Hell don't

regret missing that damn game.

A beat. Will is impressed.

WILL

Would have been nice to catch that

game though.

SEAN

(breaking)

Well hell, I didn't know Pudge was

gonna hit the home run.

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