Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Great Debates: Unlimited Liability Banking
  Bankers then and now: Given the growth of unlimited liability banking in the past and the plethora of Americans living lives of quiet desperation in the present, I suspect that the risks of unlimited liability banking could in fact attract many, many small lenders whose initial capital may be little more than significant equity in […]
• World Bank To China: Platforms, Not Products
  From its China 2030 Report: As an economy approaches the technology frontier and exhausts the potential for acquiring and applying technology from abroad, the role of the government and its relationship to markets and the private sector need to change fundamentally. While providing relatively fewer “tangible” public goods and services directly, the government will need […]
• Mining Google Book For Cultural Data
  The Noah Effect and the Joseph Effect in what people are writing about.
• The Problem of Collateral
  From Synthetic Assets: Regulators are failing to distinguish between what is optimal for the individual bank and what is optimal for society.   Liquid assets are supposedly “safe” – but for the problem that liquidity itself is inherently ephemeral.  How precisely do the regulators imagine that collateral posted by a systemically important financial institution (SIFI) is […]
• The Innovator’s Blindspot
  Even Your Best Ideas Will Fail If Your Partners Don’t Innovate Too: The companies understood how their success depends on meeting the needs of their end customers, delivering great innovation, and beating the competition. But all three fell victim to the innovator’s blind spot: failing to see how their success also depended on partners who […]
• When Policy Failures Gang Up
  Walter Russell Mead: VM thinks that hunkering down is the least bad option. We want the war to end as much as anybody, but you don’t get peace in a situation like this by making everyone think you are desperate for peace and on the brink of psychological if not military defeat. And we think […]
• Higher Ed Bubble Dipping
  From the Daily Camera: The University of Colorado filled three key administrative posts — including the Boulder campus’s chief financial officer — with retirees who are limited to working 140 days a year, but who receive nearly a full salary from the university plus pension payments from the state retirement fund. For example, Ric Porreca, […]
• The Revolution Always Eats Its Own
  Or at least keeps them from working.  How the fringe Socialist Workers Party sunk a perfectly good job-training and placement program: What went wrong for Tesco was that it fell foul of stipulations surrounding benefit payments which were beyond the company’s control. Tesco were pilloried for not paying a wage, but government rules actually prevent […]
• From Hume to Woodford…and Back to Hume?
  How much monetary stimulus is the right amount? Mr. NGDP Targeting himself answers.
• What Research Says About School Choice
  Charters, Vouchers: Good for the students, good for the public schools affected. Among voucher programs, these studies consistently find that vouchers are associated with improved test scores in the affected public schools. The size of the effect in these studies varies from modest to large. No study has found a negative impact. Fewer studies have examined the competitive effects […]
• Paint-By-Numbers Public Key Encryption
  It’s as easy as Red, Green, Blue! Really!
• The Eternal Triangle: Israel-Iran-India Edition
  India Hiding the Truth?  I think the article underplays the longstanding historical ties between India and Iran, back to when Iran wasn’t a regional and national troublemaker.  Which was pretty much any time before 1979. That said, while the Israeli press will report what it reports, there’s no particular reason for the Israeli government to […]