73s TO YOU, KIM. Number 2 Pencil's Kimberly Swygert has been having a bad week, with a car crash and a missed diagnosis. Despite all that, she promises to provide more posts of the weekend.

REMEMBERING FRANCO MODIGLIANI. Marginal Revolution notes the death of Economics Nobel Laureate Franco Modigliani, and provides a link to the Washington Post's obituary.

ECONOMICS ENVY? Daniel Drezner reacts strongly to David Adesnik's comments on the methodology of political science. Well worth a look, and be sure to go to the cross-referenced posts. (Signifying Nothing is all over the story here and here.) I'm content to observe, and to offer only these observations.

1. It is difficult to analyze data sets of any kind, new or old, without some sort of testable implications in mind a priori. That doesn't equate in my mind to microeconomics envy, in fact economists are content to let theorists theorize whether or not their work produces any testable implications.

2. The rewards to developing new data sets are proportional to the published research one can produce with them. The opportunity costs of developing such data sets are higher than those of using existing ones, but the returns are potentially greater. (This is from someone who bet his career early on on some hero projects involving his own data sets.)

INSUFFICIENT OPTIONS. Provocative Crooked Timber post on "The Rhetoric of Reaction," with a lively interchange in the comments section. Here are the options the post considers:

1. It isn't true.
2. It may be true, but it doesn't matter.
3. It’s true, and it matters, but doing something about it would (a) have the perverse effect of making that thing worse, or (b) make something else worse. etc etc.

I suppose there's
4. It's true, but it's improving.

Perhaps that's my experience with the North American variant of "right" thinking showing, where much of the debate over the effectiveness of (pick 'em) the New Deal, or the Great Society, or deregulation is about improvements in the lot of the poorest or most vulnerable absent targeted or well-intended policy changes.

WHY NOT MEET AT SCROOBY? "Church of England evangelicals go Puritan" is how Midwest Conservative Journal introduces Guardian coverage of some resistance in the Anglican Communion to the latest call for consensus from Canterbury and York (if memory serves, that's #1 and #2 in the hierarchy.) The schism continues to develop. Again, free-associating, there is sometimes something wrong with the notion of consensus ... under some circumstances, that's just another word for "tyranny of the majority." Sometimes the governing body has to recognize that there is an opposition, and sometimes the opposition just might be right.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Power Line suggests the fault line will be within the Western world view. (Just keep scrolling. Power Line has a number of posts on the fault line, and related topics.)

UPDATE: Shot in the Dark has some thoughts on related topics, including the prejudices of the cognitive elite.

(He also, by invoking the aging urban hippie in the upscale neighborhood, provokes the following wicked thought: can you infer something about a bicyclist's politics by whether or not he wears a helmet? Does that also apply to those recumbent bicycles? I have yet to see anyone riding one of those things who isn't wearing a helmet. And on those things, the rider's head is closer to the ground than it would be on an ancient Schwinn commuter bike ...)

MEASURE OUTPUT, NOT INPUT. John Hawkins has done some legwork in the OECD databases on teacher salaries and student achievement.

AND YET ANOTHER COOKIE SALE CENSORED. Details at SCSU Scholars. In this case, the sale operators broke out prices by sex and race. Is there any history at the university where this sale occurred of the advocates of pay equity for women holding a sale where they break out the prices by sex? (If so, the university in closing down the recent sale might be guilty of selective indignation. No big surprise there, I suppose. Moreover, in tolerating the pay-equity sale, the university marginalizes its economics department.)

UPDATE: Dynamist has more, including a link to some original thinking about the phenomenon.

FORBIDDEN TRANSGRESSIVENESS. "Fraternities are, symbolically, speaking, the last bastions of unrepentant wealthy white maleness on campus, and as such they are attractive targets for every campus' self-appointed sensitivity police. Fraternities, of course, understand this as well as anyone--which is why they throw such parties in the first place. If contempt is always already coming your way, you might as well court it." You guessed it: the backward-ballcap set at Duke (that might be inaccurate in the South: this article will not tell you that sometimes the Big Men on Campus dress up, as do their dates, to attend football games) had a theme party that gave offense. Critical Mass comments.

STRIVERS? Joanne Jacobs looks at British efforts to increase working-class enrollments in the better universities, by way of a different form of affirmative action. There's more at Samizdata.

AN EXAMPLE IS NOT A PROOF, BUT A COUNTEREXAMPLE CAN BE A DISPROOF. Newmark's Door takes issue with Joe Stiglitz on the sources of innovation.

AT WAR. Milt's File recommends a Mark Helprin essay that argues the current efforts against international terrorism are inadequate against a backdrop of a thousand-year conflict between Islamic and Christian polities. Charlie Sykes posts 23 questions that he'd like to ask opponents of the liberation of Iraq. Advocates might want to answer these questions as well. Common Sense and Wonder links to some impressions a former police chief from New York City brings back from Baghdad. Atlantic Blog recommends a spot-on cartoon (may require registration.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Would 'twere that more people could communicate information effectively and tersely at the same time!" (The Knowledge Problem.) Quite so. Aspiring writers would do well to read and understand Rights of Trains (details or compare prices,) particularly those sections on the approved forms of train orders. Length or verbosity do not equate to profundity.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES beams down to Pathetic Earthlings. Once again, the host shows creativity in arranging and theming the posts.

MEASURE INPUTS, NOT OUTPUTS. Suzanne Fields contrasts spending with achievement in the government schools, concludes that the money is not being deployed well. (Does that give new meaning to the bumper sticker, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance?") Milt's File, which pointed to the Fields column, notes, "The one thing she leaves out is how higher education has been 'dumbed down' to accomodate the poorly educated among the cohort that reach the college level." Perhaps NOW is the time to begin changing that situation. These are no longer the middle 1990s, when universities might have seen some value in cosseting students in order to maintain enrollments (although their purposes in so doing might have been motivated for cosmetic reasons, showing their commitment to "diversity," or in order to keep sufficient fee money coming in to pay off the mortgages on the new administrative -- hardly ever academic -- buildings and the athletic facilities.)

In a related post, The American Mind weighs in on the consequences of universities morphing into trade schools that do the job badly -- once the degree loses its signalling value, what role will there be for the university? This is not a trivial point, as businesses are already spending heavily on basic skills training that the common schools used to do. And once again, NOW is the time to confront that problem, while there is sufficient enrollment pressure that individual professors, with the support of their universities if it's offered, without if necessary, can weed out the underachievers.

OFF. ON? Asymmetrical Information reports a reversal from the Ninth Circus Circuit. For now, the California recall goes on as initially scheduled. Additional details at Priorities and Frivolities.

IDENTIFICATION PROBLEM. What grade would an econometrics term paper get, if it attempted to quantify the effect of a steel tariff on employment in steel-using industries, without controlling for the business cycle? Such a report, however, might be close enough for government work. More in a similar vein here, including suggestions that the tariff fails to deliver the political benefits the Administration sought.

PROTECTING COMPETITORS IS NOT PROTECTING COMPETITION. Wisconsin's minimum markup law still hasn't gone away, notes Charlie Sykes. (The law has one redeeming feature, because it always provides a way to get students back into economics mode after the Thanksgiving stand-down. You can almost count on a store operator, somewhere, holding a clearance sale on turkeys of the Christmas-shopping Friday that runs afoul (a-fowl??) of the law.)

THIS DEFIES PARODY. Cal Pundit passes along the story of Representative Don Young (R.-Alaska) removing some airports from the list of traffic control towers to be privatized. Why? Because the Representative maintains a room in a Sheraton near one of the airports, and he wants to be sure the airport operates safely.

Let's see if I get this straight. A pilot is intent on Osama-bin-Ladening Representative Young in his hotel. (As if the Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is a 72-olive target, but I digress.) What possible difference does the employer of the traffic controller who clears the pilot for take-off make in the operation of the aircraft, once it has taken off?

LET'S REMEMBER OUR HISTORY. Power Line comments on Vice President Mondale's explanation for why he advocated higher income taxes. "Mondale must have forgotten how Ronald Reagan, after beating Mondale, cut taxes and created the biggest economic boom in history" (quoting Richard Johnson.) Erm, no, not quite. President Reagan carried those 49 states in 1984. In 1986 he signed a tax reform act that put in place one of the biggest expansions of the tax base in history. Marginal tax rates matter, but so do exclusions, exemptions, deductions, and credits, many of which ceased to be after the signing of that law.

UPDATE: Tapped on the same point, albeit with editorial comment.