When corporate CEOs in your state are ready to exchange HQs with Pacific Ocean views for those of a landlocked desert, you know you’re doing something wrong. That’s what’s happening in California, where nearly two dozen firms are considering dumping the Golden State for its drab and arid neighbor, Arizona.Like Texas, Arizona smells the blood […]

Russian counter-terrorism forces pulled off a successful raid against an Islamist militant forest outpost in Derbent, Dagestan, killing five. A sixth was killed in a shoot-out at his village home in Ingushetia. In the restive North Caucasus, this is par for the course, as Reuters notes: A suicide belt, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and grenades […]

Watson, IBM’s flagship supercomputer, is now officially in the health care business. Forbes reports that the company has reached an agreement with Memorial Sloan-Kettering and WellPoint to allow their health care providers to use Watson’s vast analytical powers to help make treatment decisions.Dr. Watson will analyze patients and give doctors several treatment options ranked according to probability as well as the reasoning […]

How much is that college degree really worth? It’s not just a question for students and parents anymore, but for Congress and for state officials as well, says the WSJ. This week Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) are expected to re-introduce a bill to force states to provide more information about college […]

Iran’s politicians are engaged in an epic squabble that threatens to turn the country upside down just a couple weeks before national elections. Over at Foreign Policy, Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar does a great job summarizing what’s happening: During an unprecedented debate at the parliament, which ended in mayhem and the dismissal of the labor minister, Ahmadinejad […]

North Korea conducted its third nuclear test in six years this morning, literally and figuratively sending shockwaves through the Asia Pacific. Experts are saying this most recent test was larger than the previous two, perhaps in the six to seven kiloton range.The Nork nuke test challenges both Xi Jinping and Barack Obama for different reasons. For […]

An otherwise laudable attack on the mythology of locavore economics cooks its ingredients on too high a flame.

Filibusters, the foibles of the Senate, and the trials and tribulations of campaign finance reform.

The contemporary vocabulary of “American Exceptionalism” comes to us courtesy of doctrinaire Communists and Catholics, from as recently as the 1930s. Really.

D ecember 2012 saw the passing of the great development economist, Albert O. Hirschman, at the age of 97. Development economists spend their time these days performing randomized controlled experiments, in which a particular intervention like co-payments for mosquito bed nets are introduced into one group of villages and not into another matched set. This […]