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an excellent (wide-audience targeted) article on the upside of income inequality, by Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy. Greg Mankiw also writes about it (and singles out exactly the fragment I wanted to single out).
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a clear KO administered by Steven Levitt to some ‘journalist’ who tried to criticise him and made a mess of himself, rather… That was nice (don’t upset Levitt if you’re not a pro and particularly don’t do it if you have no clue what you’re talking about…), but I think Levitt is wasting his time with answering such nonsense in such detail, and he’d rather give some reactions to the interesting part of the criticisms raised, for instance, by Rubinstein (Rust and Heckman are other heavyweights that criticised Levitt in the past). I summarized a bit of all that on this blog, a while ago.
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one very interesting piece of Paul Rubin in the Washington Post, on the link between evolution and (some) people’s wrong opinions on immigration and trade. I cannot agree more with one of his conclusions: “A deeper understanding of economics is like reading- it must be taught“. Via Greg Mankiw (though I can’t really see this as ‘Darwin versus Smith’…).
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an older entry of Bernard Salanié (who’s recently decided to take a break from blogging: I hope it won’t be for very long…) on Maths prodigy Terence Tao (you can read a short description of Tao’s work- and of the other recent Fields medal laureates- that got him the recent Fields medal, in the March number of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society; in the same number there is also an interview with him and with the other two Fields medalists who did not decline the honour, like Perelman) . The bottom line is that you should take the Terence Tao Test (TTT) as well- and don’t forget that he had solved it perfectly before he was 8 years old :-).
