St. Paul Was in Minneapolis Last Night. "Tonight John McCain will be in St. Paul, but St. Paul will be in Minneapolis." Huh? That was a line spoken yesterday by Doug Wead at a political convention in Minnesota. The first "St. Paul" he mentioned was the city where the G.O.P. is holding its convention; the second one is Ron Paul, leader of the [...]

Democratic Dominoes: A Guest Post. Peter Leeson, the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University and author of the forthcoming book "The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates," blogged here earlier this week about U.F.O.'s and Bigfoot. This is his second of three posts. Since the dawn of the cold war, a "democratic domino theory" [...]

Any Suggestions for an October Surprise?. Well, we've already had a September Surprise in this election, but what about a more quintessential October Surprise? Vladimir Putin seems to believe in the possibility: he says the Georgia clash happened because the U.S. "needed a small victorious war" to benefit the candidate preferred by the current administration. Yesterday at the G.O.P. convention, I asked [...]

The FREAK-est Links. Where Cubs fans go when they die. Religion doesn't always lift you up. Germans are good at creating board games with lots of rules: go figure. (Earlier) The economics of panhandling: "It's just like a job." (HT: Marginal Revolution) (Earlier) From NeedCom

Haiku Writers Know …. Congratulations to Sophie, the runaway winner of the economic haiku contest, for this beautiful composition: Haiku writers know The opportunity cost Of a syllable. Sophie not only wins Freakonomics schwag, but also the right to post haikus on the Freakonomics blog whenever she pleases. As is often the case when the prize is so great, this contest was rife [...]

The Economics of the Amniocentesis. Photo: kaatje85 An amniocentesis (or an "amnio") is a fairly common procedure among pregnant women that involves the extraction of a small sample of amniotic fluid surrounding a fetus. The main benefit of an amnio is that it can diagnose genetic disorders in a fetus, including Down syndrome. But there is also a real cost, as [...]

Our Daily Bleg: How Good Is My "Serenity Prayer" Argument?. Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own - it needn't have anything to do with quotations - send it along here. This week I would like to depart from the usual blegging for suggestions of quotations to [...]

Are Ex-Smokers Even More Likely to Gain Weight Than Previously Thought?. Photo: miss pupik We've blogged several times here about the rise in American obesity and its various causes. From one of those earlier posts: Why has the U.S. obesity rate risen so much? Many, many answers to this question have been offered, most of them having to do with changes in diet and lifestyle (and, to some [...]

We Need More Sheriffs Like This One. From the Lake County Sheriff's Office From a Chicago Sun-Times article by Dan Rozek: Lake County Sheriff Mark C. Curran Jr. sentenced himself today to a week in his own jail, saying he believes spending time behind bars will make him a better cop and a better person. (Hat tip: Arloa Sutter)

You Can't Have Outdoor Bookshelves in Every City. In Bonn, Germany, I noticed a bookcase full of books in the public park where I run, with a young woman removing one book and returning another. These are used books that make up essentially a free voluntary lending library. Would this cabinet last undamaged in a U.S. city one day? I doubt it. Similar things [...]

The Last Thing in the World I Would Ever Think Google Earth Would Be Used For. It seems that cattle and deer tend to graze while standing in a north-south direction. No one had ever noticed this until some researchers used Google Earth to study the question. The researchers think it has something to do with Earth's magnetic field. (Hat tip: Spectre)

Samuelson and Buckley at Yale. Wolfers's view that Paul Samuelson's Economics text book is "the greatest economics textbook ever written" is not universally shared. In fact in 1951, before the book gained its iconic status, a young William F. Buckley Jr. devoted considerable energy to attacking it. A core part of Buckley's book God and Man at Yale is an extended [...]

A Note on Freakonomics Student and Teacher Guides. School is back in session, and Freakonomics continues to get shoved down the throats of students in everything from economics and finance classes to philosophy and literature classes. For this we are grateful, if baffled. To make things easier, our publisher commissioned a student's guide to the book as well as an instructor's guide. The student's [...]

Three Great Social Contractarians: Hobbes, Locke, and … Blackbeard? A Guest Post. Peter Leeson, the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University and author of the forthcoming book "The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates," blogged here earlier this week about U.F.O.'s and dominoes. This is his final post. From left to right: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Captain Blackbeard (a.k.a. Edward Teach). We've [...]

McCain Doesn't Really Hate Economists, Does He?. Photo: soggydan Political rhetoric tends to be overwhelmingly simple while economic analysis is often needlessly complex. This is not news. But it does make for a big disconnect between what politicians say and what they hope to do - because if they publicly said what their economic advisers told them, voters would either riot or fall [...]