1. The dean of Chicago's business school calls the "students as customers" model "corrupt and corrupting."

2. I read Kotlikoff and Burn's "The Coming Generational Storm" over Christmas break and am using it in my public econ course this semester. I have some minor quibbles about hyperbole and snarkiness in the writing, but K&B do a fantastic job explaining the unstainable entitlement programs for seniors. Robert Samuelson's article in the WaPo makes the same point.

3. James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth have an interesting paper on the role of institutions in economic development. They find that the number of years islands spent as European colonies is positively related to growth. James Hamilton discusses the paper here.

4. Arthur Laffer paid a visit to GA; from the AJC:

Under the proposal, all existing property taxes — including those on real estate — would be eliminated. Georgians would instead pay a 5 percent state income tax, with some exceptions for the poor, and a 5 percent consumption tax on goods and services. Local governments and school boards would not lose any money under the new system, Richardson said.

The idea comes from a former economic policy adviser to President Reagan whom Richardson recently hired to study overhauling Georgia’s tax system. Richardson has started working with Arthur B. Laffer , an economist considered by many as the “father of supply-side economics.” Along with Laffer, the speaker has hired Donna Arduin, a former fiscal advisor to several governors, including Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Jeb Bush of Florida.

GA's income tax code is already relatively flat (the top mtr kicks in at something like $20k of taxable income) so I see only modest potential for efficiency gains. By contrast, I see lots of room for harm if the legislature starts carving out special interest provisions.

5. NPR ran an interview with Johns Hopkins economic geographer Roger Stone. An excerpt (via Lex Nex):

Prof. STERN: Well, I was studying another topic, frankly, when I began to hear the Bush administration claims that Iran had so much natural gas and oil it couldn't possibly need nuclear energy for electric power. And it turned out, as I looked closer and closer at the issue, I began to discover what appeared to me to be severe structural policy-based weaknesses in the Irani petroleum sector.

Prof. STERN: Well, first they have failed to reinvest in their industry, so both the well infrastructure as well as the refineries are old and decrepit. Second, they've subsidized domestic demand. So there's no revenue from that. And that cheap oil fuels explosive demand growth. So Iran has the highest demand growth in the world.

6. Some folks in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro region of North Carolina have started an alternative currency, the PLENTY (Piedmont Local Economy Tender). A comparison of the PLENTY's ostensible advantages over the US dollar is here. The anti-globalization bent of the PLENTY movement reminds me of one of the most spectacularly wrong-headed things I've ever read: A local environmental activist opined that we should live only on goods and services produced in this county.