Informal Rules and Food Trucks

Planet Money has a great podcast about the food truck business in New York City. It discusses regualtions that make every parkinjg place illegal, how vendors identify good spots, the economics of location and how it is influenced by product differentiation. But my favorite part was the discussion of informal rules that govern the use of parking spots: If someone has been in a spot for 10 years that is his spot; if there is already a taco truck on the block, don't park your taco truck there.

RIP Levon Helm

http://youtu.be/-VShpcqd3zE

Reply All

Don't use it. This morning I received an email regarding attendance at a conference that I am not planning on attending. It turns out that it was sent to a list of people who should not have received it. I then received over 40 emails from people who were hitting reply all. First, a number of people thought it was necessary to inform everyone that they did not know why they were receiving the email. Then other people started replying to all that they should stop replying to all. These were professors at places like the LSE, Univ. of Chicago, and USC. Can't we all just hit delete?

Saudi Women and the Olympics

Saudi Arabia plans to send zero women to the Olympics this summer. What will (should) the IOC do? 

Good news for me

From the Wall Street Journal

And Selgin's review of Bernanke's history of the Fed

Here.

The History of the Fed

Here is a video of George Selgin lecturing on the history of the Federal Reserve.

Here is a video of Ben Bernanke lecturing on the history of the Federal Reserve.

They do not entirely agree about the benefits of the Federal Reserve System.

Double Blind Studies

The Economist reports on the pseudo placebo effect in randomised control trials.

"In a new paper, Erwin Bulte of Wageningen University and his colleagues conduct a double-blind test of an agricultural intervention—that is, the treated don’t know whether they are receiving the treatment or the placebo. The treatment is a modern seed of cowpeas, the placebo is the traditional seed. As a second experiment in a different set of villages, they do a normal RCT where the treated know that they are receiving the modern seed. Comparing the results of both experiments reveals some striking results. When the farmers don’t know which seed they are planting, there is no difference between the modern and the traditional seed in terms of yield. When they do know that they are being treated, the modern seeds yield considerably more. What the authors call the “pseudo-placebo effect” therefore accounts for the whole effect that a typical RCT would have found."