Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Some things are up to date--and Internet connections are about to be a generation in the unequally-distributed future--here along the not-so-wide Missouri where the women do not look especially crazy, but the rabbits definitely are...

Yes, I am in Kansas City: this year I am on sabbatical as a Visiting Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation for entrepreneurship. Why Kansas City? The Kauffman Foundation has smart people who think differently than I do and a very interesting mission in a part of the country that I have not lived in before.

And my wife Ann Marie Marciarille decided--correctly, in my view--that Americas's law schools need another professor of health regulation and finance law and has got herself a job as Associate Professor of Law at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

First reactions:

• We only caught the tail end of the summer, real-estate transacting and whatnot. But everybody says it was awful.

• The truly scary thing was the drive up to Omaha to have lunch with a child (as she drove the entire length of I-80) at the (quite good) Blue Planet Nature Grill: 150 miles of stunted, dying, and dead corn stalks on the way.

• The coffee place two blocks south is better than any place in Berkeley: it is still run by crazed coffee fanatics who have put a DC-3 on top of their processing plant, while those who work at Berkeley coffee places these days do not treat it as a Vocation-with-a-capital-V.
• Todd Akin and the rest of the Missouri Republican Party are truly scary crazy.
• And the Kansas Republican Party is worse.

• I suspect that in five years Johnson and Wyandotte counties will secede from Kansas to become East Kansas--they don't want to be taxed to support the rural poor, but they do want functioning schools and paved roads and fire departments and--no matter what Justice Roberts says--the buy-in according to which the federal government pays 90% of the cost of Expanded Medicaid.