The National Bureau of Economic Research recently published a Working Paper on purchasing power parity citing the contribution of the Late Scholastics.

From the Dynamist Blog, Virginia Postrel directs us to her latest column in the NYT.

Restaurants are limiting smoking—not always because of state intervention, but because customers demand it. If anything, local “no smoking in restaurants” ordinances are anachronisms before they hit the books.The article in question has several glaring economic mistakes (what articles don’t?), but it offers a nice summary of how the market for restaurant meals has evolved.

Albuquerque’s aviation director says he might seek federal permission to use private security screeners at the Sunport instead of ones hired by a federal agency. [Story] (thanks to a reader)

We didn’t announce the new header yesterday because, well, it is rather obvious. We are still tweaking things here and there, of course, but we have been so very pleased at how smoothly it has gone. Meanwhile, Wayback, the website museum, collects: 

Colleges offer their students a taste of reality by simulating the political atmosphere of society with the presence of student government associations (SGAs). The election process alone succeeds in mimicking the cutthroat environment of campaign promises, schmoozing constituencies, and mindless pride. Rather than encouraging students to be productive in the academic sense, this element of student life encourages students to popularize themselves no matter the costs or disposal of ideological reason.

For kicks, and to make sure that I don’t just buy libertarian “indoctrination” without listening to the opposition, I’m on the Heritage Foundation e-mail list. Today, I received an entertaining article on the PolicyWire. Marriage Amendment Protects Federalism by Edwin Meese III. The sad thing is, it’s not intended to be entertaining. But, when error is so rampant in a document it’s hard not to find it to be somewhat amusing.

A new series on the Traffic Security Administration, running in the Seattle Times, reminds us of something that is obvious to anyone who has flown after 9/11: centralized government property protection is always a bad idea. An excerpt:

MSNBC has an interesting article on Mind Reading. Usng a functional MRI (fMRI) machine, which is able to show brain-activity in real-time, Prof. Quartz (neuroscientist) and Prof. Camerer (economist) have been using the machine to understand problems of decision-making.

Prof. Glimcher, a a neuroscientist at NYU, has shown that: