ECLECTIC POSTING AT THE MARGINAL REVOLUTION. A recent post with a lot of economic substance focusses on ticket pricing. One promoter clearly doesn't get it: "Obviously, everyone should have equal access to tickets, especially if you're a fan that lines up overnight. It should be fair and equitable." That's just another form of rationing. Only the people who are rich in time get the tickets. Steven Landsburg argued in Armchair Economist (details or compare prices that the queue is a way of obtaining a separating equilibrium in which the ticket buyers are more likely to buy souvenirs at the concert. (The bigger mystery to me is, why is it that people now line up for lottery tickets. You can camp out and still not get the ticket.) There's also a post on the non-punctuality of Italian trains in the Mussolini era, which comes as no surprise. It's the Milwaukee Road that knew how to run trains to time, and the Hiawatha Service is still among Amtrak's more punctual services.

They've also commented on some recent provocative research into discrimination studies that find racial discrimination when the phenomenon at hand was really class discrimination. (One of the disadvantages of posting for so long is that I remember commenting, and linking to other commentary, noting the baggage associated with ghetto names being a possible confounding factor in such studies, but I don't remember the month. Call it Halfzeimer's disease. If I stumble across the posts, I'll update.) Anyway, here's the confounding factor, with less editorial comment

From the research paper: "a woman with a BNI equal to one (implying a name that no Whites have) is 10 percentage points more likely to have been born to a teenage mother and 9 percentage points more likely to have been born out-of-wedlock than a Black woman living in the same zip code with the same age and education, but carrying a name that is equally common among White and Blacks. The woman with a Black name is also more likely to have been born in a Black neighborhood and to herself be unmarried.

Marginal Revolution's take: "In other words, names carry information even after the typical information available on a resume has been taken into account and the information that especially black names carry plausibly suggests lower productivity. It's papers like this that explain why professors need tenure."

Hit and Run has some coverage, with a lengthy discussion in progress.