Noted for January 12, 2013
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus: The Twelve Caesars: Book IV: Gaius Caligula
Mark Thoma sends us to David Altig: macroblog: Visualizing Labor Market Improvement
Miles Kimball: Q&A on the Financial Cycle
Richard Bookstaber: Using Agent-Based Models for Analyzing Threats to Financial Stability
Aaron Clauset: How Large Should Whales Be?
Dan Conover: Xark!: Why I shut down comments: "I was an early pro-comment partisan in the news business…. I found great examples of smart community moderating policies and technologies, and purchased the CMS that offered the most-evolved comment management tools. I believed then, as I believe now, that the ability to comment and share across horizontal, informal networks is the killer app for the 21st century. Which sounds nice…. [But] we've taught users bad habits and turned comment sections into troll ghettos…. [B]etween 2005 and 2009 was that regular people left blogging for social media platforms that far better suited their purposes…. Once a community stops functioning, its comments turn to spam…. Last year I wrote an essay here…. And a day or so later, someone left a comment for moderation that I considered nothing more than a hateful turd deposited atop work I wanted to share with others…. There's no conversation going on here. The conversation moved. And I'm not about to let stupid strangers smear shit all over work I value based on nothing more than an outdated principle. Still, I hung on for a while, unwilling to apply my new understanding of Xark's place in the new world. Call it nostalgia."
John Quiggin: Public choice = Marxism
James Buchanan: What Hath Keynes Wrought? - Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes
James Buchanan: The Spread of the New Gospel - Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes
