Month: December 2006

Hey, Lady: Stay Off 72nd Street

It’s things like this that really make you wonder about the laws of probability. What are the odds that two massively unusual events would happen to the exact same person?

A woman whose apartment was burned in the high-rise crash of New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle

Feeling Overwhelmed

Perhaps the reason so many people end up either shuttering their blogs or becoming part of group efforts is the simple fact that there are times when daily blogging is just too hard. Lately, I’ve had to really force myself to blog, and both the quality and quantity of posts here has been declining, as I’m sure my few remaining readers have noticed.

It’s not that there’s nothing going on, either in the world or in my own personal life. The problem is, most of what’s going on in my own life I’m finding it hard to write about — for example, Scott’s health issues are his, not mine, and it’s not really my place to talk about them here. Another big issue is that I don’t know what’s going to happen with my internship after I graduate. I’m so stressed out that it’s a conversation that I just don’t want to have with my boss, yet it’s one that I really need to have: knowing whether I still have a job, and if it is a part-time or full-time gig, and at what rate of pay, is not unimportant information! I have 2 challenging finals standing between me and graduation, and my parents are coming to visit on Thursday which means I need to clean the hell out of my house. And I have no clue what I am going to wear for Graduation under the cap and gown. (Please no dirty jokes)

Dealing with all of that has pushed my ability or desire to pay attention to the rest of the stuff that is going on in the world to the back burner. All in all, I’m feeling overwhelmed, and the more overwhelmed I feel, the less I feel like blogging. It would be nice to have a few co-bloggers to fall back on in times like this. But for better or for worse, Fiat Lux is a solo effort, so as I go, so goes the blog.

This isn’t a “Goodbye Cruel World” post. I’m not shutting down for good. But I suspect that light blogging will be the rule of the day for the next few weeks.

Dr Atrios Speaks

From yesterday, but still worth quoting:

With the minimum wage in the air, I see the Econ 101 trolls are out in force. Look, unless you believe that the labor market is accurately characterized as perfectly competitive then not only is it the case that the minimum wage doesn’t necessarily, reduce employment, it’s actually quite possible that small increases in the minimum wage will increase it. To the extent that firms have market power, and there’s plenty of reason do think they do, the impact of small minimum wage increases can potentially be either “paradoxically” to increase employment or to just basically be a wash. You can read Alan Manning’s book if you’re interested in more, or if I’m extra inspired later I’ll given you the Econ101 version of monopsony (sadly, not always actually taught in Econ101) so that even smart Ph.D economists can understand.

The real point is that if the minimum wage has small or negligible employment effects, and there is both theoretical and empirical support for this idea, then it’s a pretty effective and inexpensive poverty reduction program. Obviously if poverty reduction programs for poor people interest you less than, say, poverty reduction programs for oil executives then you don’t much care about that.

For The History Fan In Your Life

If you’re still looking for a holiday gift for a history fan, you might want to consider a little novel that an old friend of mine back home has just published: Die Fasting.

Here’s the blurb from his site:

The year is 1758, and though the locale is workaday New York, the landscape is wildly exotic. Our fresh-faced hero is Thomas Dordrecht, raised on a remote farm