Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

I DON’T MIND THIS, SO LONG AS IT WORKS:

OPEN THREAD: Do that comment voodoo that you do so well.

BUT IF YOU POINT THIS OUT YOU’RE RACIST OR SOMETHING:

THE GLORIES OF MULTICULTURALISM:

JEFFREY CARTER: Black Monday.

I saw Black Monday trending on Twitter. Most of the people tweeting about Black Monday weren’t alive for Black Monday. If they were, they were potty training or learning their colors.

TL:DR There will be no Black Monday tomorrow. No one, and I mean no one, can call a market crash like that. As a matter of fact, the dean of Finance Professor Eugene Fama said something really prescient to me once. “You only see crashes in the rearview mirror.” He’s right of course.

Of course, the fact that the predictions for tomorrow have no basis doesn’t rule out a Black Monday either.

THAT’S GOOD, SINCE THEY DON’T WORK: CVS pulling popular cold medications from shelves. I always assumed they put out the ineffective phenylephrine products mostly as a placebo to pacify people angry because they made pseudoephedrine, which works wonderfully, so much harder to get.

BRYAN CAPLAN: Stop Thinking Like A Tourist.

The year is 1997. You visit a lovely rural town in North Dakota. Population: 3000. You take a bunch of pictures with your analog camera to treasure the sweet memories.

Twenty years later, you return. The lovely rural town is now a regional fracking center. Population: 100,000. The charm has vanished beneath a tidal wave of new construction — residential, commercial, and industrial. You take one picture with your smart phone where you shed a tear of sorrow with New Frack City in the background. Your caption: “Progress?”

From a tourist’s point of view, you’re clearly right. Lovely rural towns are much nicer to visit than regional fracking centers. Almost anyone who saw Before-and-After pictures would agree with you: The town’s gotten far worse.

But what’s so great about the tourist’s point of view anyway? Tourism is just one tiny industry in a vast economy. If a billion-dollar fracking industry replaces a ten-million-dollar sight-seeing industry, that’s a $990M gain for mankind, not a “tragedy.” The transformation is clearly good for the 97,000 new residents of the town. It’s good for everyone who consumes the new petroleum products. And while the original inhabitants will probably gripe about all they’ve lost, they’re free to sell at inflated prices and move to one of the many remaining lovely rural towns.

And there’s no moral high ground in wanting to deprive those 97,000 people of a living so you can take pretty pictures. Being anti-growth is selfish.

DON’T TRUST CHINA. CHINA IS ASSHOE.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Academia is bringing about its own destruction.

More and more people are asking what value it brings for the resources it consumes, and the obvious harm it is doing.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: Global Warming? Where? “The Abstract bluntly declares that ‘standard climate models are rejected by time series data on global temperatures’ while the conclusions state ‘the results imply that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be sufficiently strong to cause systematic changes in the pattern of the temperature fluctuations.'”

Plus: “‘To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?’ may prove to be the most important scientific paper in the last 10 years.”

WEIRD, NOBODY WORRIED ABOUT THAT UNDER “WARMONGER” TRUMP: