I think I pulled a laugh muscle.
June 2008 Archives
At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok takes Paul Krugman to task for claiming food safety is deteriorating because of deregulation. The fact is food borne illness is on the decline over the last decade or so. It's clear our food is getting safer, not the other way around.
I pointed out the same thing back in '06.
In other scare-them-into-regulation-news, some people with a lot of time on their hands took to studying golf cart safety:
McGwin recommends driver education and safety standards for golf carts, which are largely unregulated. He also called for the use of helmets and seat belts and better golf course design to reduce steep hills, sharp curves and other hazards
Helmets to ride in a golf cart.
While few on this side of the border pay attention, the drug war in Mexico is looking more like an honest to goodness shooting war. It's a bad time to be a policeman in Juarez, where 17 cops are among the 400 (!!) homicide victims so far this year.
Of course that sort of thing won't be contained by a line on a map. Thomason hospital in El Paso is on lockdown again while a casualty is tended to.
Update: Some recommended reading on the subject.
Michael C. Moynihan takes a quick look at the Swedish economy in response to someone pointing to it as a success of socialism (sorry, 'social democracy'). Among other things:
The government figure of 7 percent unemployment was repeatedly mocked by both former Prime Minister Göran Persson's detractors and allies. A study by McKinsey Global estimated the true figure—which included those on sick leave, in early retirement, in jobs programs—to be between 15 and 17 percent. Jan Edling, a researcher with the Social Democratic trade union LO, estimated the total figure of unemployed to be 19.7 percent. (Edling's report was suppressed and he was himself offered "early retirement.") The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise said the figure was 16.5 percent. Other studies ranged from 12 percent to 18 percent.
My curiosity leads me to ask how much poorer western Europe would be without the technology which has come from their cousins across the Atlantic. If the US economy had limped along at the same rate as theirs for the last sixty years where would they be?
