Multum In Parvo

Many interesting pieces crossing the wires (so to speak) today...

• Ed Glaeser on how entrepreneurship saved New York and damned Pittsburgh. Cities have to compete for scarce resources (residents and their money), too.
• Fascinating work on the geography of personality. Find the full paper here. This is interdisciplinary social science at its best. It also shows the Midwest (at least the part I'm from) in a really good light.
• Patri Friedman's exhortation to libertarians to quit whining and try to make a freer society actually happen. He makes a lot of sense, really.
• Will Wilkinson on cooperation and civil society. His discussion of "higher-level" public goods relates closely to the issues I raised about the SSIP.
• Gary Becker argues that the drop in housing prices has not influenced overall consumption very much. His argument about "wealth effects" and housing prices is especially compelling.
• A fascinating interactive graph of shifting religious identification in the USA. Apparently, we are becoming less likely to identify as religious and the center of this population is shifting eastward. Read a decent article in Newsweek that relates to this notion here.
• Richard Posner's review of this book on psychology and economics. I think this issue is critical to understanding not only the economic crisis but human behavior more generally.