1) Commenter Mike Chlanda: I’ve randomly picked you to receive my copy of The Heights. Please email me at [email protected] with your shipping information so that I can send it to you. Thanks all for your interest in the book.
2) Russ Roberts gave a fantastic and humbling talk at the Mercatus Center holiday dinner last night that I wish that I could link to here. It was broadly about the limitations of economics as an objective science. Economists have a strong tendency to see what they want to see in data. It seemed particularly relevant to yesterday’s post. I can look at the evidence and see that clearly cities are essential for productivity growth, while Randall O’Toole dismisses those studies as insignificant. Also given yesterday’s topic, Russ had a great quote that was something like, “there are many things that economics isn’t good for. It’s too bad that one of them is macroeconomics.”