Professional Management

La Crosse recently had a referendum on having a professional manager/administrator. The current county Administrator, Steve O'Malley has taken some heat for advocating for the form of government. The paper ran a story saying Steve asked for an ethics ruling. One could argue that his professional code of ethics from the ICMA requires of him to advocate for professional management.

This research concludes that professional management delivers better fiscal outcomes for cities:

This article however, counters that the evidence is not always so clear.

Monkeys and Fairness

Below is an excellent video on pro-social behavior and fairness among monkeys. The good stuff is at 12:00min and 14:40. Monkeys demonstrate interdependent utility functions.

Dog Names and Breeds

I love data. As an Economist and Professor you sometimes find yourself with interesting datasets that need to be shared. I have a group of students doing a project for a dog daycare in town. In order to survey dog owners we got the list of dog licenses from the county. It has the name, address of the owner, and the name, sex and breed of the dog. Below we have the top 20 names for dogs in La Crosse County for 2012. Remember these are licensed dogs.

Below I have the top 20 breeds from La Crosse.

One Percent

Do you want to join the one percent? Getting a degree from the college of business increases your chances. The NYT breaks down the top one percent by undergraduate degree.

What Not To Do

A great example of how not to design and deliver a presentation. In this commercial Microsoft demonstrates why they suck, or at the very least why their Ad Agency sucks.

Binge Drinking

Below we have a chart that visualizes the rate of binge drinking by state, which I'm grabbing from this blog. The Midwest to some degree, and the colder northern regions to a larger degree, appear to have the highest rates. What are some theories that can explain this relationship?

Krugman

Here is yet another great reason I have trouble respecting Krugman these days. In fact at one point thought I would write a blog post listing all of his intellectual flips, but the list grew too long. As Alex points out at the end:

Now to be fair, Krugman covered himself in 2003 in a credible way he said “unless we slide into Japanese-style deflation, there are much higher interest rates in our future.” Thus, I do not fault Krugman’s forecasting ability. What I do fault is that despite a 180 degree about-face, one thing remains constant in all of Krugman’s writings, anyone who disagrees with him is portrayed as a mendacious idiot. In truth, Heritage today and Krugman 2003 both have legitimate concerns about the long-term debt situation of the United States and it would have been to the credit of Krugman 2012 had he acknowledged that point more fairly.

Yeah, Krugman covers his bases so as to have intellectual wiggle room. I get the reasons he does what he does - as a rhetorical style. But as an academic, I don't respect the lack of intellectual honesty and lack of openness Krugman now has. They were qualities I had so admired in the Krugman of old, despite our policy differences.