Conor Clarke

[UPDATE: part two is here and part three is here.]I spoke with Kenneth Arrow, Stanford Professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist, for about an hour last week. Dr. Arrow is perhaps most famous for the eponymous Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, one of the cooler ideas in public choice economics. But his work is wide ranging and we talked mostly about other topics. (I also couldn't think of anything to ask about the Impossibility Theorem.)I have divided this interview… More »

After a fun week of guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, I'm going to Argentina for nine days. I have absolutely no intention of using a computer, reading an email or writing a blog post. But I will take lots of pictures and I will be back on July 27. More »

I should have mentioned this a few days ago, but I forgot. Anyway, as the headline of this post suggests, I'm guestblogging for Andrew Sullivan this week. I have a couple more interviews to grind through (I'm talking to Kenneth Arrow later this afternoon) and I'll post those here, but all of my other blogging will be on the Dish. But I will note that the Dish doesn't have a comment section, so if I write anything stupid over there please feel free to leave any and… More »

This is the second part of my interview with Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling. Part one is here. In this part we talk very generally about climate change: Why it matters, and whether or not it's possible to reach an international agreement on the issue. My questions are in bold. More »

[Update: Part two of the interview is now posted here]Over the weekend I spoke with Thomas Schelling, who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on game theory and collective bargaining. Schelling's early work was about war and arms control, but I wanted to speak with him about a different collective bargaining problem that's been in the news: Global climate change. Climate change presents the world with an incredibly complicated bargaining arrangement.… More »

Wait, no. All possible angles have been covered! So let me just say that I agree with most of what Megan McArdle says here -- Bruno is pretty funny but thinner than Borat, and seems not to realize that there's a difference between laughing up (at the powerful) and down (at the powerless -- and add a couple of spoiler-free points.First, I think Sacha Baron Cohen had a much harder trick to pull off this time around. This is partly because, as the film confesses, the… More »

Will Wilkinson, Megan McArdle, Dave Weigel and I had a laconic little debate on Twitter yesterday about the USA Today article on the politicis of stimulus spending. Painful though it is to admit, 140 characters proved limiting! So we transferred over to the old-fashioned blog world, where Will commened on my last post: I think you're right that the article does not really establish what it implies, which would require comparison to the Republican counterfactual… More »

I have no idea, but if I were trying to answer the question I wouldn't ask USA Today. This article by Brad Heath is really one of the silier pieces of journalism I've read recently. The headline -- "Billions in aid go to areas that backed Obama in '08" -- certainly suggests political manipulation. But that headline could just as easily read, I dunno,"Billions in aid go to areas that backed McCain in '08"or."Billions in aid go to wealthy Americans"or."Billions in… More »

The Recovery Act The New York Times says that doubts are rising about Obama's stimulus plan, and raps the states on the knuckles for spending a lot of that money on the rural areas rather than cities. James Pethokoukis and the The National Review (!) say enough funds aren't being used for infrastructure and job creation projects. And USA Today says the money that is being used for infrastructure projects isn't being used properly. I find these complaints pretty… More »

Roll Call and others are reporting that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has urged Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus to drop his proposal to tax employer-sponsored health benefits and stop chasing Republic votes. For fans of a strong public option, this might be a good thing: less compromise means the center of gravity shifts left. (Of course, it might be a bad thing too: a shift to the left means a greater chance of a bill not passing.)But dropping the idea… More »

Let me leap to the defense of my corporate slavedrivers at the Atlantic Media Company and say that I find this piece by Slate's Jack Shafer pretty thoroughly unconvincing. I'm biased, of course. But can Shafer really believe that "Every new off-the-record venue drives a measurable quantity of political discourse out of the public sphere and into the private"? If that's really a problem, then he has a lot more to complain about than the Atlantic Media… More »

I wrote today's Idea of the Day over at the Atlantic's special ideas report. The idea is to "Get Rid of Polls," although that might be putting it a bit strongly. The more temperate version would be "the case against polls." In particular, I think polls have impose three costs on American democracy. (I'll put them after the jump.) I'm not sure how large these costs are. But I'm also not sure what to put on the other side of the ledger: What are the public benefits… More »

Via Catherine Rampell, I see the new economics foundation (hip lowercase in the original) has released its second Happy Planet Index. The index attempts to rank the world on the basis of how efficiently countries produce happy lives -- that is, lifespan and level of satisfaction divided by rate of resource consumption. Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica come out on top.Whether this is a meaningful measure is an open question. Measuring happiness raises… More »

Concerning the history of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, Megan writes:Now, everyone on the left was united in favoring auctions over giveaways. Auctions also had a fair amount of support on the right, mostly from people who hate corporate welfare even if they also oppose cap-and-trade. ...[B]ut the fact is that at the end of the day, you couldn't do this perfectly obvious thing that has surprisingly broad support among the policy elites of both parties.… More »

I have been meaning to write something about this ever since Jim Manzi linked to Indur Goklany's Cato paper climate change a couple weeks ago and wrote that "before anybody gets on a high horse about how CO2-laden economic development is such a threat to the poor of the developing world, he really ought to have a response to this analysis." So, in the interest of scrambling back atop the high horse, let me say a couple of things about Goklany's analysis (PDF). More »

But no need to fear a defamation lawsuit here: I confess that all of the legitimate, innocent explanations for Palin's resignation are starting to seem maybe kind of possibly plausible. (The innocent alibis seem to be (1) she wanted to protect her family; (2) she wanted to avoid further legal bills; (3) she wanted to cut her losses in state politics; and (4) she wanted easier access to a national platform.) Some of them even seem admirable. But if one (or several)… More »

Jeez, the number of theories grows by the hour! Who dares pick now? If there really is an indictment in the offing, I fear that breathless speculation won't nudge it along any faster.But what I do find genuinely intriguing is what the Palin diehards have been saying. You have, for example, the good people of Conservatives 4 Palin comparing the Alaska governor's resignation to Julius Caesar. And you have Bill Kristol speculating that her gamble could turn out to be… More »

Paul Krugman makes the argument for a second stimulus in this morning's New York Times. I dunno. I like the idea of sustained stimulus spending. But even if you ignore the big political problem that Paul raises -- passing through the eye of the financial storm is nothing compared to passing another big stimulus bill -- wouldn't this just run up against the natural limits of how quickly the funds can be spent?A month and a half ago the Times reported that less than… More »

That was one of the questions that came up when my friend Conor Friedersdorf and I did an episode of blogging heads TV yesterday. More generally, the question was: Why should we care when politicians have affairs? And why should journalists spend so much time writing about them? Because of the common human aversion to hearing one's own voice, I haven't watched the BHTV episode. But the position I remember taking is basically this: There is little reason to care… More »

Via Noam Scheiber and Matt Yglesias, I see the White House has posted its staff salaries (PDF). As Noam notes, just about all the big players -- Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod, Larry Summers etc -- top out with salaries of $172,200. That's nothing to scoff at, but as Matt says it's "hardly enough to put you in the stratosphere of the American economic elite."And that's true. Nonetheless, I think it's important to realize that a job at the White House has… More »