Blog Review 483

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blog-review-483

Installing metal detectors in schools: according to one teacher they'll manage to get the pupils in at about the moment when it is time to break for lunch.

Another rejection of the idea: on principle, not simple empirics. 

Comparative advantage , cooking and satirical argument. Is it really the business of society to iron out the unfair advantages of endowment? 

Comparative macro-economics. Germany has a budget surplus: not a bad thing to have at the beginning of a world-wide (possibly) economic turndown.  Something of a pity that the UK's economy wasn't managed similarly.

It would appear that physicists, when publishing papers, understand markets better than economists do when publishing papers: 

In addition, physics has a laissez-faire attitude about publication, believing that it is better to err on the side of letting as many new ideas in as possible, and to let the market eventually decide what is good and what is bad through a Darwinian process that selects what is useful and forgets what is not.

Hugo Chavez seems (again) to be picking every bad economic idea from around the globe to impose upon Venezuelans. We've known that this would all end in tears but it seems to be accelerating. 

And finally, the great econblogging debate of our times: did Adam Smith actually visit a pin factory or not?