Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Now, this has nothing to do with me or my job.  The secretaries at my institution are the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human beings I’ve ever known in my life.  But my friend tells me that not all academic secretaries are as competent as the ones here.  In fact, my friend is on [...]

Henry Farrell says the problem with books is they’re too long. He’s talking about nonfiction, but it goes for fiction too. I understand the impulse on the supply side toward thick books: I myself have witnessed bookstore shoppers choose one book over the other because “this one’s thicker.” (Said out loud in so many words.) [...]

Probably just a coincidence, but today Dean Baker writes about how trucking-related statistics like diesel fuel consumed and trucker-hours-worked as “an up-to-date measure of the production and sale of goods in the economy.” Saves time over waiting for the quarterly GDP numbers. But he concludes
Unfortunately, the Labor Department just stopped publishing this index for the [...]