Random links
- More Work, but Less Stress? Why Don't Americans Have Longer Vacations?
- "Americans may work longer at the job, but the corollary is they also work less at home. The contrast is most notable for women. Figures from time diary studies in the 1990s reveal that European women worked almost 10 hours more doing housework than their American counterparts ... American families relied instead on paid labor and services to accomplish the domestic tasks that wives still perform in Europe. Add formal and domestic work together, and the differences in total work are much less stark than usually presented."
- Kinder Surprise egg seized at U.S. border
- "She was warned she could have faced a fine after the customs official found — and seized — her $2 Kinder Surprise egg as illegal contraband. Bird learned U.S. authorities have banned the candy because they come with a plastic toy inside that could, if eaten, choke a small child."
The person in question also noted that they'd received a letter from the U.S. government saying that they've have to pay a $250 storage fee if they wished to contest the seizure and prevent the egg's destruction.
- How Big Is Porn?
- This Forbes article argues that widely distributed estimates of the spending in this industry, claiming that it exceeds, e.g., all professional sports spending are excessive (although even then there's still a very significant amount of money involved.
- Past and Present
- "Interesting, too, was the undercurrent to be found in many conversations of interest in the history of economics itself. History of economic thought – or history of science, if you prefer – is a subject that has all but disappeared in the last thirty years as a topic of major research interest or as a subject of courses in top graduate schools – precisely the period of economic triumphalism."
The article goes on to quote James Heckman of the University of Chicago as saying that "People in the past were smart and they made mistakes and had insights,” he said afterwards. “We have sometimes forgotten the insights and we have sometimes repeated the same mistakes." As the saying goes, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.