• West Coast fishermen embark on new wave of fishing, including discussion of ITQs.
  • Chicha! (It’s a traditional Latin American beer—I had it in Ecuador—where the fermentation process is kicked off by chewing corn and then spitting it out to ferment 🙂
  • Summer of Work Exposes Medical Students to System’s Ills, a thought-provoking article in the NYT about UW med students.
  • Initiative 1000 update: 28 got prescriptions for lethal drugs; 16 died, shows that death-with-dignity in Washington is proceeding much as it did in Oregon.
  • French carbon tax?
  • Good Luck Getting Private Insurance for Unemployment, a no-duh article about adverse selection. Reminds me of Martin Feldstein’s proposal for individual accounts.
  • Greg Mankiw on climate policy: A Missed Opportunity on Climate Change .
  • A Reluctance to Retire Means Fewer Openings; the lump of labor fallacy?
  • Health Care That Works; contrast with “I, Pencil”.
  • Beryl Sprinkel, Reagan Economic Adviser, Dies at 85 says this: A remark by Mr. Sprinkel is often quoted by monetarist economists for its elegant succinctness: “Control the money supply and everything else falls into place. Thank you, and good night.”
  • Nice local article by Sightline about the Chamber of Commerce efforts to hold a “Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” about climate change.
  • A great quote from a phone interview of 2007 Nobel winner Roger Myerson by Nobelprize.org: “At the heart of mechanism design is something that I call an incentive constraint. We have several different kinds of incentive constraints, but what I think mechanism design was ultimately about was about adding to economics incentive constraints to resource constraints. Economics used to be about allocation of resources, that was what you said it was about, and now we say it’s also about motivating people in organizations… People need to be given an incentive to share information, people need to be given an incentive, an appropriate incentive, to exert effort… Resource constraints seem to be only about the market. Incentive constraints are both about market competition and political competition. And in that sense I think mechanism design has been part of an extension of economics which enables it to become more integrated with political theory… With incentive constraints they’re all part of the same analytical methodology, and so we were able to unify the foundations of legal institutions and political institutions as well as economic market institutions. And I think that’s important for us to understand the real problems that make a difference in the wealth and poverty of countries.”