Elephantstrunk

Elephants can recognise themselves in mirrors.

Mark Thoma quotes from the abstract:
These results — both the negative effects of segregation, and the indication that neighborhood segregation matters more than does school segregation — stand up in the face of a variety of statistical tests designed to rule out competing explanations. The segregation effects do not appear to be attributable to differential […]

For a while the Prius made driving a fuel efficient car cool, or at least the kind of thing a Hollywood actor of a certain kind might do. It’s an ugly car but it’s hybrid technology wasn’t available with 4 doors anywhere else. Like iPods you didn’t get a flash one or a cheap one, […]

Fairtrade coffee probably wouldn’t exist in an ideal world and neither its results nor its implementation are ideal. It would be much better not to have to choose coffee on any criteria but price and taste but alternative routes to development for coffee growers have had plenty of time to work and failed to deliver. […]

Oil prices aren’t determined by supply of oil. That’s one of the conclusions Dave Cohen reaches in his extensive essay on oil prices. James Hamilton seems convinced:

Econbrowser: Is peak oil irrelevant?
Is peak oil irrelevant?
Does the market price of oil reflect a recognition that the resource is fundamentally limited?
Dave Cohen, writing at the Oil Drum, […]

Rwanda’s economy is expanding quickly. And coffee exports are helping fuel it.
Since 1995, the country has often achieved 7 percent annual growth. This year, coffee surpassed tea as the country’s biggest export, bringing growing prosperity to the country’s 500,000 coffee farmers. One group of 20,000 farmers saw revenues of about $800,000 last year, says Dr. […]

A serious problem for the effectiveness of school choice:
Mergers between schools are almost as unsuccessful as tie-ups in the corporate world with 55 per cent leading to lower educational standards. By comparison, 50-70 per cent of company mergers fail to achieve their objectives and, on average, lead to a 10 per cent fall in share […]

Via Mark Thoma, authoritative  and thoughtful comment on biases likely present in the production and publication of empirical economic research from Edward Glaeser. The fuss being made of the JHU report on deaths in Iraq and the paper on distribution of results of significance tests in published papers in the paper cited by Thoma make […]

Winterspeak marvels at an Onionesque combination of headlines on the New York Times: “North Korea Explodes Nuclear Weapon, Colorful Bird Discovered in Columbia”. It’s quite likely that the actual source of the bird story is the noble AlertNet, home of the unironic “Choose a crisis” menu.
It may also be responsible for the use of cute […]

Mary Ann Sieghart’s article in the the Times is quite reasonable for an article by, for and about Tories on the subject of tax but this paragraph has the beginnings of a personality cult.
But Mr Osborne is playing a shrewd strategic game. He, like Mr Cameron and George Bridges (political director of the party), was […]