fling93 loves fishies

The real lesson from Miers (and Katrina)

My DSL has been down, and I’ve just gone through a hellish week, but I just thought I’d say one quick thing over lunch about Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court.

It’s one thing for conservatives to complain about Harriet Miers not being conservative enough. They’ve been waiting a long time for this opportunity, and so it’s hardly surprising that reality fail to live up to their expectations. But when conservatives are screaming about Bush’s cronyism, well, that’s pretty amazing (see Stephen Bainbridge here and here, Randy Barnett here and here, Right Wing News, Jim Lindgren, Greg Djerejian, Powerline, and Michelle Malkin).

Of course, it’s not hard to see why. Katrina exposed former FEMA head Mike Brown as an obvious crony (I say obvious because, despite all the accusations of cronyism, I have yet to hear an explanation of why Bush thought Brown’s background actually qualified him for the job). Indeed, cronyism within FEMA seemed to extend much further than Brown. Which raises valid questions about the qualifications of Bush’s other appointees (like cockroaches or baseball players on steroids, if you see just one crony, you probably actually have a whole bunch).

Maximizing utility is just a model

For my Microeconomics night class, our professor surprisingly assigned us a murder mystery short novel, The Fatal Equilibrium. This was, however, no ordinary mystery, but one that was a mix of murder… and economics (what, you thought I was going to say underwater basketweaving?). The author, Marshall Jevons, is actually the pseudonym for two economics professors, William Breit and Kenneth G. Elzinger.

It’s not classic literature by any means. You’d occasionally find economics lectures somewhat crudely squeezed into the dialogue. They made it appear somewhat more plausible than your average Mathnet episode, as the characters were mostly college professors, the kind of people who probably squeeze lectures into normal dialogue all the time in real life. But it was plainly obvious what parts of the story were intended as entertainment and what parts were education. Still, it was a neat way to review topics such as price elasticity and consumer surplus and to see how it related to real-world examples. And one passage in particular struck me.