You would think that people who are more educated, wealthier, and more politically engaged - you know, cosmopolitan - have more contact with opposing points of view. But no, it turns out the elite life is an echo chamber.

You're scared of genetically modified food, so you eat organic. There's only one problem:

One of the most effective standard methods of breeding to obtain improved crops is to bombard seeds and plants with gamma rays to alter their DNA by causing mutations, some of which can then be selected for a desired trait. (Incidentally, organic farmers, in their desire to avoid artificial chemicals, are even more dependent than conventional farmers on crop varieties generated by irradiation.) Irradiation alters both chromosome structure and genome sequence in a way that is quite random. Moreover, there is no legal requirement to test such irradiated products either for effects on health or for what they might do to the environment. By contrast, genetic modification in the laboratory introduces a well-characterised gene or genes into an established genetic background without big disruption.

Students are not internally motivated, so we should bribe them to do well.

According to Blogger, this is my 500th post. To mark the occasion, I'm asking my huge audience for feedback. What have been your favorite and least favorite posts? Should I quit blogging completely? Should my posts be longer or stay the same length?

Sure, diversity is good. But if you have to choose between social cohesion and diversity, dump diversity:

People who celebrate diversity (and its parallel, multiculturalism) are endorsing only one part of what it means to be a complete human being, neglecting morality (and its parallel, group and national pride). Just as we cannot be whole persons if we deny the fundamental rights of others, so we cannot be whole persons if we live in ways that discourage decency, cooperation, and charity.

I mentioned this study before, but the article I'm linking here is better and more interesting.

Theodore Dalrymple on the "new atheists":

Metaphysics is like nature: though you throw it out with a pitchfork, yet it always returns.

Megan McArdle on school vouchers:

You're already sending your kid to private school. You're just confused because your tuition fees came bundled with granite countertops and hardwood floors.

PLOS Medicine asks "Which Single Intervention Would Do the Most to Improve the Health of Those Living on Less Than $1 Per Day?"

The responses range from recognizing our interconnectedness to direct cash gifts. I still like the Copenhagen Consensus as an answer to that question, because it has a bit more method to it than simply asking "experts."

The best book review of 2007:

Owing to laziness, busyness, and a bogus holiday that shut down all the city’s mailrooms at the worst possible moment, I have been forced, very much against my will, into the most blindingly obvious irony I’ve ever been obliged to arch my inner eyebrows at: I have to start writing my review of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read without actually having read the book.

Aid money to Africa just disappears down a black hole:

Already today there are increasing numbers of Africans who call for an end to this sort of support. They believe that it simply benefits a paternalistic economy, supports corruption, weakens trade and places Africans into the degrading position of having to accept charity. "Just stop this terrible aid," says the Kenyan economic expert James Shikwati.

And some related thoughts from Mexico [my rough translation]:

So the question isn't how to eliminate poverty. The policymakers should ask themselves how those who have the least can generate wealth. For example, what are the goods and services that they can produce themselves?

Yes, I know that linking a post in a foreign language immediately makes me a Grade A arrogant pretentious pseudo-intellectual jerk. But being arrogant, pretentious and pseudo-intellectual is maybe the whole point of this blog.

A defense of open borders.

Drug legalization is already here:

How people get their dopamine or other brain chemicals is ever more explicitly, like the rest of medicine, tied to questions of class.

On page 7 of today's Colorado Daily, an ad for Whole Foods. The text reads "Love our store but hate the parking lot? We now have more parking spaces to better serve you!"

Distributing malaria preventing bed nets is tricky:

In practice, nothing much had been working. In 2000, a world health conference in Abuja, Nigeria, set a goal: by 2005, 60 percent of African children would be sleeping under nets. By 2005, only 3 percent were.

By all means, we should distribute bed nets, and the more the better. But DDT may be a cheaper and more effective tool to fight malaria. Of course, what we really need is a vaccine.

The end of incandescence.

Most wealth is intangible:

Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries.

It's education day on Evil Line. The other day I told my conscientious, hard-working roommates that spending a lot of time grading was worthless, so I've paid my penance by reading several education articles.

Robert Frank is talking about economics education, but what he says echoes the thoughts of Carl Wieman on teaching physics. It's also similar to what my department is starting to do with the calculus sequence: less material, more slowly, with an emphasis on explaining verbally what you're doing rather than procedural fluency in doing it. Also see Keith Devlin on what we mean by "conceptual understanding."

That's all about college education. For high school and below, we have arguments that school choice doesn't work and that school integration doesn't help. So what does work?

False confessions may not be that rare, since researchers can recreate them in the laboratory:

Most volunteers denied it, but as the initial task they were given was made difficult, they became less sure because they were distracted. When researchers had confederates lie about having seen the volunteers hit the Alt key, the number of people who confessed went up to 100 percent. Every stage of increased pressure led ever larger numbers of volunteers to believe they were really guilty.