Man has only one tool to fight error: reason

— Ludwig von Mises

1.  William Easterly, “How I Would Not Lead the World Bank.”  Easterly’s is a parody of Jeffrey Sach’s piece for the Washington Post, “How I Would Lead the World Bank.”  Easterly and Sachs, of course, have had their academic differences for quite a while (i.e. The End of Poverty vs. The White Man’s Burden).

2.  Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, “How to Get Rid of Konys.”  The authors of Why Nations Fail provide context to the “Kony problem,” recently made popular by an internet meme storm.

3.  Was Milton Friedman a Keynesian?  David Glasner and John Cochran, who summons Roger Garrison, leave responses to Krugman’s charge.  Like I said in the comment I left to Cochran’s post (none of which was actually relevantly addressed by the two replies), a lot of the “Keynesian” assumptions accepted by Friedman were not “Keynesian” at all — I summon Leland Yeager’s essay, “The Keynesian Diversion.”  Glasner’s post, though, seems like the most well informed.

4.  Arnold Kling, “Economics: A Million Mutinies Now, Part Two.“  Kling gives a brief history of the debate between Keynesians and Monetarists, and in the end concludes that both are probably wrong.

5. J.D. Harrison, “Why Immigrant Workers are Critical to the Economic Recovery.”  Harrison talks about growth in both low-skill and high-skill job sectors, and suggests that immigrants are needed to fill in these spots.  Related, Wayne Cornelius, in his article “The Structural Embeddedness of Demand for Mexican Immigrant Labor,” suggests that there are a lot of highly technical manufacturing sectors that hire almost exclusively from Mexican pools of labor.  Why?  Mexican laborers are perceived to be hard workers, and it has worked out for these firms to hire on a referral basis (present employees refer their friends to employment opportunities).  This saves these factories the effort, time, and money of having to advertise and seek employees.