In an article that will no doubt annoy orthodox leftists who cannot stand when a member of the creative class defects from their camp, Mamet describes how he came to break with 'brain dead liberalism.'

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' [Village Voice]

We decided to write about the Chocolate Wars yesterday because it nicely illustrated a recurrent economic dynamic—the way companies attempt to use government regulation to gain competitive advantage. Alexandra Wolfe’s article in Portfolio touched on an important aspect of this dynamic when she described the efforts of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, a trade group dominated by the biggest names in chocolate, to get the government to lift restrictions on the recipe for anything called chocolate. Big Chocolate, really from competition from artisanal chocolate makers and increases in the price of cocoa butter, wants to use cheaper ingredients to cut the costs of manufacturing the stuff.

We wanted to emphasize the other side of this regulatory battle—the economic motives of the artisanal chocolate makers who are lobbying against the Big Chocolate reforms. The artisanal crowd makes lots of unsustainable arguments against the proposed reforms that serve to cover up what’s really going on. And what’s really going on is what’s always going on, businesses seeking advantage over competitors.

The artisanal chocolate makers advance some extremely unsound arguments. The first is that chocolate made with substitutes for cocoa butter—a smoothing ingredient that adds texture to chocolate—are vastly inferior. But if this were true, they’d welcome Big Chocolate’s move. Customers would turn away from New Chocolate the way they turned against New Coke, opening up a huge market for the artisanals.

What the artisinals seem to fear is that New Chocolate won’t be bad enough to drive away customers from Big Chocolate. To put it differently, they suspect that chocolate consumers may decide that they’d rather eat cheaper stuff made without cocoa butter than pay a premium for the old-fashioned product. And they want to make sure that consumers are given the opportunity to make this choice. And what they really want is to prevent Big Chocolate from engaging in price competition with their more expensive products by finding cheaper ways to make chocolate.

[More on the Chocolate Wars after the jump.]

“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all group.”--Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson.

You know what would be totally amazing? If the destruction by fire of more than 1,600 homes and buildings, massive evacuations and widespread business closures turned out to actually be an economic boon. Sure money is a small consolation to those who have suffered losses from the fires. No-one want to sound too happy about this thing. But an upside is an upside, right?

You can tell a lot of people wish the world worked like this because they keep pretending it does.

“Economists have noted the perverse reality that in the wake of disasters, re-construction spending helps the economy, even as people are still struggling to recover from their personal losses,” Tom Beemis wrote on Market Watch on Tuesday. And here’s more of the same from the Los Angeles Times. And more from the usually whip-smart Mark Lacter at LA Biz Observed. Some even took issue with our very own Joe Weisenthal's skepticism about wildfires as an economic boon.

One indication that this isn’t quite how things work is the fact that we jail arsonists. If burning down buildings and shutting down businesses was an economic boon, we’d treat arsonists like investment bankers. Or at least philanthropists.

Unfortunately, for arsonists and the rest of us, this isn’t how it works. While some California home builders and other’s who will help clean up the mess after the fires may gain, this gain is merely the loss of business and investment that would have gone elsewhere. Even money paid out by insurance companies is money that is now going to rebuild what we already had instead of getting invested in wealth increasing activities.

It’s easy to overlook this because we’re dealing with a counter-factual, with investments and purchases that won’t happen because the money is now being used to pay to repair the damage from the fire. But one thing that is certain is that the activities being described as helping the economy, and the money used to undertake those activities, are being done at the expense of what would have been done had the losses from the fire not occurred. There’s no stimulus here that isn’t being replicated as a loss in other parts of the economy.

The losses from the fire are terrible. One reader estimates they might add up to as much as $2.8 billion. It’s like California was run by Stan O’Neal for six months. There’s no upside, unless you happen to root for California home builders to gain at the expense of others. There’s no economic blessing rising from the ashes.

But it’s pretty to think so.

Could Calif. fires draw a line under housing crash? [Market Watch]
Fires won't hurt long term, economists say [LA Times]
Fires and broken windows [LA Biz Observed]

If a guy in the stall next to you was attempting to solicit you for sex, would you recognize the signals? The odds are that unless you are involved in anonymous same-sex cruising, you wouldn’t. And that’s one of the advantages of such signals—they are mostly unrecognizable, and therefore likely to go unnoticed, by outsiders.

Two economics writers have taken the Larry Craig scandal as an opportunity to explore the economic theory of how coordinating signals can evolve somewhat spontaneously. Some of it should be familiar to anyone who has dealt with the way non-public information gets passed along in financial markets—particularly how conventions of passing along non-public information get established by the particularly bold or needy and eventually become widely known to insiders but are largely invisible to outsiders.

Of course, we hope you’ll read these for the interesting questions they raise about market signaling and spontaneous organization. But we might as well tell you that after you read the pair of essays, or watch the video above from Slate, you’ll know all you ever wanted to—and probably a lot more than you wanted to—about picking up men in a men’s room.

what can bathroom cruising contribute to org theory? [OrgTheory.Net]
Larry Craig [Marginal Revolution]

If the Economist’s “Free Exchange” blog didn’t exist, Michael Lewis would have to invent it. And, in a sense, he did. In this morning’s Bloomberg column, Lewis—tongue planted firmly in cheek—explains that the main lesson from the subprime fallout is that “finance is one thing you should never engage in with the poor.”

“Our society is really, really hostile to success,” Lewis writes. “At the same time it's shockingly indulgent of poor people.”

It’s written so straight forwardly that you almost believe that Lewis is transcribing his column straight from the reactionary brain of a right-wing elitist, except that elitists long ago learned to stop thinking and talking in such shocking ways. But someone didn't get that memo at Free Exchange, which this morning began a column by announcing that “America’s so-called poor live like kings.”

More after the jump.

When it comes to making strange bedfellows, modern finance makes politics look like an old-fashioned match-maker. The most famous words on the current financial turmoil came not in the form of a political speech from a major presidential candidate, but from Jim Cramer, a former hedge fund manager turned popular CNBC stockpicker and market prognosticator. His five-and-half minute call for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, however, strangely recalls the most famous political speech of an earlier era—William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The emotional desire of the nineteenth-century populist movement Bryan led was to smash the power of Plymouth Rock, which stood for old New England and Wall Street. The emotional desire of what Dan Gross has called “the Punch Bowl Caucus” is to cut interest rates—return the punch bowl—to jazz up the Wall Street party again. But they share an emotional tone—and, more importantly, an economic goal: the loosening of a monetary policy they claim is so tight it is ruining ‘their people.’

Gross’s essay nicely describes the membership of the Punch Bowl Caucus: Wall Street investment banks, hedge fund traders, private equity managers, the chief executives of heavily indebted automakers, the heads of home loan businesses, supply-siders who believe “the government should never intervene in the economy, unless it is to bail out hedge funds and investment banks,” and internationalists who worry about what would happen to the developing world if Americans suddenly quit spending their earnings on foreign goods.

Since they share an emotional tone and the goal of loose money that inspired the old Populism, but differ in their background, let us adopt “Wall Street Populism” as the proper term for the Punch Bowl Caucus. It is, after all, something of a Free Silver movement with gilted edges.

There are, of course, crucial differences. The old populist were openly egalitarian radicals while the Wall Street Populists are openly elitist radicals—concerned about the jobs and firms of people who have been in the financial industry for, as Cramer put it, “twenty-five years.” The old populists viewed Wall Street and the railroads as their enemy. The Wall Street Populists are, well, closely tied to Wall Street. The old populists spoke in the eloquent and evocative images built from the Christian tradition. The language of the Wall Street Populists is less burdened by syntax, tradition or allusion.

That the cause of looser money gone from those who wished to smash Plymouth Rock on the Grand Canyon to those who want to keep Wall Street afloat on free credit shows how different twenty-first century finance is from nineteenth century finance. You know that Wall Street long ago stepped through the looking glass when a hedge fund manager adopts the cause of William Jennings Bryan. We’d call it “unreal” except that it is all too real.

The Punch Bowl Caucus [Slate]

For much of history, the rich really were different. They had more descendants, for one thing. And they tended to prize thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work over more fun things like being spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving. And their children were downwardly mobile, poorer than they were.

Those differences may explain why the surge in economic growth that historians call the Industrial Revolution occurred, economic historian Gregory Clark argues in his forthcoming book, A Farewell To Alms. According to Clark, it was the spread of people descended from British nobility that hatched the Industrial Revolution.

Today Nicholas Wade of the New York Times' Science Section describes Clark's thesis.

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

Another significant change in behavior, Dr. Clark argues, was an increase in people’s preference for saving over instant consumption, which he sees reflected in the steady decline in interest rates from 1200 to 1800.

In short, the downward mobility of British upper classes gave rise to the Industrial Revolution that resulted in a dramatic upward mobility for much of the world. To put it slightly differently, just because money can't buy you love doesn't mean loving can't make you richer.

In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence [New York Times]

The "stand-up economist" translates Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw’s introductory economics textbook "The Principles of Economics" into more useful, shorter and funnier restatements. (And, yes, we do realize that the words useful, shorter and funnier are more or less synonymous.)

There's a full transcript and explanation here.

[Hat tip goes to the Big Picture for bringing this to our attention.]

Economist Greg Clark more or less argues that there is a genetic basis for capitalism, the industrial revolution and that this basis more or less explains why the industrial revolution took off in England rather than, say, in France, Italy or Germany. Of course "capitalism" itself probably isn't genetic but many of the traits that make for successful capitalists probably are heritable.

Here's the abstract to Clark's paper:

Before 1800 all societies, including England, were Malthusian.
The average man or woman had 2 surviving children. Such
societies were also Darwinian. Some reproductively successful
groups produced more than 2 surviving children, increasing their
share of the population, while other groups produced less, so that
their share declined. But unusually in England, this selection for
men was based on economic success from at least 1250, not
success in violence as in some other pre-industrial societies. The
richest male testators left twice as many children as the poorest.
Consequently the modern population of the English is largely
descended from the economic upper classes of the middle ages.
At the same time, from 1150 to 1800 in England there are clear
signs of changes in average economic preferences towards more
“capitalist” attitudes. The highly capitalistic nature of English
society by 1800 – individualism, low time preference rates, long
work hours, high levels of human capital – may thus stem from
the nature of the Darwinian struggle in a very stable agrarian
society in the long run up to the Industrial Revolution. The
triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much
in our genes as in ideology or rationality.

You can read the entire paper here [pdf].

More discussion here from the lads at Gene Expression, here from Marginal Revolution and here from Steve Sailer.

We asked and you answered. Commenters were evenly divided between finding Bright Young Thing Emily Oster Cute and Not Cute nor Hot. But with additional ballots for “could get hot,” “IB Analyst hot” and “country club hot” we’re almost ready to declare Emily Oster officially “Fetching.”

But why not take this to a broader vote? So below please vote on Emily Oster’s Hotness Metrics.

We're pretty sure that Emily Oster is more than just a set of nice eyes and a pretty smile. But we can't get over how every time we hear about her someone mentions that she's a hottie. Yesterday's New York Times story follows the typical pattern: mention her youth, her marital status (she married the boyfriend who helped her come up with her PhD thesis), and talk about how popular she is. It's probably no good to directly mention her looks, so better to simply run the photo.

But we're not the New York Times, and so we'll ask the question directly: is Emily Oster genuinely hot or just, you know, economist hot?

The Future of Economics Isn’t So Dismal [New York Times]

It's twelve hours before your presentation to the credit committee. The work isn't done yet. The model isn't working. The team is starting to look burned out. You're looking back over the week and remembering those hours you killed chatting with friends on the phone, shopping for Christmas presents, reading websites and looking for a new apartment. If only you could have skipped the procrastination you could get your work done smoothly, and skip these late nights.

Wrong. It turns out the reason procrastination might be so ubiquitous is that it might be rational. An article by Isaac Sorkin and Henry Swift gives us plenty of good reasons why procrastination makes sense.

• Fixed costs to starting work. Just getting started involves some costs—filling up on coffee, making a couple of calls to clear your schedule, making sure your Adderall prescription is filled. Putting off work for one long killer session means you don't have do do these things over and over again.
• Decreasing marginal costs of working. It's possible that the second hour of work is easier than the first, and the third easier than that. Analysts see this all the time in modeling. Things start clicking. You start to see through the spreadsheets, seeing seven moves ahead, the way chess champions know where things are going after the opening. Meetings often work this way too, getting easier as everyone gets a feel for the other side.
• Thick-market externalities. You probably goof off at the same time as your friends and co-workers, and buckle-down at the same time too. It's fun to send links to your buddies, laugh about that Swedish girl from the bar last night, skip out together to head over to Starbucks. Skipping these things to work smoothly over the day involves an opportunity cost of missing out. So it makes sense to clump work like the rest of the team.

Makes sense to us. And now you don't have to feel guilty reading about the sex-lives of Pepsi executives or the auto-accident's of bankers on DealBreaker.

An economic study of procrastination [The Swarthmore Phoenix]

The LA Times is running a piece on economists as celebrities (hat tip Barry). Well, they're not quite celebrities yet. More like blogebrities. But we've got to stop this before it goes any further. You people realize that if we make economists into celebrities, soon we'll be watching videos of Lindsay Lohan making out Larry Kudlow on TMZ.com, right?

Fame found Tyler Cowen on the back seat of an airport bus.

Travel-weary after a long flight back from a family vacation, the economics professor was returning to his car at Baltimore/Washington International Airport. Suddenly, a man leaned across the bus aisle to shake Cowen's hand, pronouncing himself a "huge fan" — not of Cowen's economics work, but of the Internet blog the George Mason University faculty member created three years ago.

"My first question was, 'How do you know what I look like?' " Cowen said. "I thought that was a little strange."

But since he and colleague Alex Tabarrok started the blog Marginal Revolution, which has had more than 6 million visitors, Cowen has become something he didn't even know existed: an economics celebrity.

Thanks to life as an econo-blogger, "I'm invited to give a speech or something at least once a week," Cowen said.

Now online: slide-rule celebrities [LA Times]

Every now and then its good to come across a reminder that some people do not understand the way markets work. Today we came across this little beauty from Mike Kinsley, who thinks he's proved that the stock market is irrational because, well, let's let Mike explain:

So, free-market capitalism has decreed three different values for this company. One is set by the stock market: the value of all the company's outstanding shares or "market capitalization." One is what the private investors are offering—usually a bit more than the market cap. And one is what the private investors sell the company for a blink of an eye later—which is usually a lot more than the other two. Which of these numbers is the true capitalist price? Which one represents the most sublime interaction of supply and demand? Anyone? Anyone?

Okay. Here's the thing, Mike. There are actually a lot more prices than you've listed here. Every time a stock trades hands it's because two individuals or institutions have a disagreement on its price value. Each day a stock trading on an exchange may have hundreds or thousands of prices. In fact, all free market exchanges represent the trading of goods of unequal value to the parties involved in the exchange. That's why they're trading one for the other. There's no such thing as "the true capitalist price" of anything. What we've got, instead, is the prices people are willing to pay for things, and the prices people are willing to accept to give up those things.

Does that mean that one side of every transaction is wrong and the other is right? Of course not. Different people have different tolerance for risk, different time horizons and different investment goals. The search for the "true capitalist price" assumes a uniformity of market actors that just doesn't match reality.

Update: Ted Frank has a less theoretical critique of the "infuriatingly stupid Kinsley essay":

Michael Kinsley notes that publicly-traded stocks are sometimes bought out and taken private, and that private equity managers sometimes make profit on these deals. He concludes that the free market does not work.

The non sequitur is appalling. It is apparently beyond Kinsley's comprehension that private equity managers could add value to a corporation through better management.

Kinsley acknowledges that private equity managers, by taking a company private, could be increasing the value of a corporation by avoiding the regulatory burdens that accompany public trading, but then again concludes that this shows that the free market can not work, rather than the obvious conclusion that the regulatory constraints on the free market are inefficient and create opportunities for profit through avoidance.

The Free Market Free-for-All [Slate]

From the Wall Street Journal:

Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman, one of the most influential economists of the last century, died today. He was 94.

Mr. Friedman's death was also announced at a conference of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington by the institute's vice president of academic affairs, James A. Dorn. The audience of academics and policy makers observed several moments of silence in observance.

Mr. Friedman was awarded the Nobel prize in 1976. He has long championed the cause of political and economic freedom and the links between the two. He has originated, or been associated with, many breakthroughs in economics since the 1950s. He is best known for explaining the role of the money supply in economic and inflation fluctuations. He also, with this year's Nobel prize winner Edmund Phelps, developed the theory in the 1960s that policy makers couldn't achieve a permanent tradeoff between lower unemployment and higher inflation, and that efforts to do so would simply result in the same unemployment rate and higher inflation, a view that holds sway at major central banks today, including the Fed.

Mr. Friedman also exercised extraordinary influence not just through his academic work but through his advice to politicians and his many popular books, such as Capitalism and Freedom in 1962 and Free to Choose, with Rose Friedman, in 1990, which was made into a television series.

Mr. Friedman had enormous impact on economic policy though he never had a formal job in a government administration after World War Two. His opposition helped lead to the end of the draft. He was an adviser to President Ronald Reagan. He has been closely associated with school vouchers and other applications of free market principles to policy issues.

Mr. Friedman died of heart failure after being taken to hospital near his home in San Francisco, his daughter, Janet Martell, said today. His wife Rose Friedman, who co-authored many of his books, survives him.

Influential Economist Friedman Dies at 94 [Wall Street Journal]

We’ve been to enough board meetings that look like those Miller Lite “Man Law” commercials to know that having more women on corporate boards is probably a good idea. But we’re a bit skeptical about this recent study sponsored by TIAA-CREF which claims to demonstrate that having three or more women on the board “enhances corporate governance.”

But before we get all grumpy about this, here’s a summary from the Conglomerate blog of what the study shows.

The study was based on interviews with 12 CEOs, 50 women directors, and seven corporate secretaries of Fortune 1000 companies. The study found that women impact board governance in at least three ways, (1) by bringing different perspectives into boardroom discussions, including the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, (2) raising difficult issues--that is the study found that difficult problems are less likely to be ignored when women are in the board room, and (3) by altering the dynamics in the board room to create more open and collaborative discussions, thereby allowing management to hear board concerns without feeling defensive.

Well, we suppose it’s nice that the women bring “different perspectives,” raise “difficult problems” and create “more open and collaborative discussions.” But what’s all this got to do with enhancing corporate governance? We’ve only read the executive summary, so maybe there’s harder data in the study than we’ve come across, but we can’t help but suspect that these things are themselves considered “enhanced corporate governance.” Because the way that phrase is used is often as a cover for promoting various political or social agendas rather than as finding better ways to deliver value to shareholders.

Critical Mass on Corporate Boards [pdf]

When we linked to some mild criticism of Nobel Peace Prizer Muhammed Yunus and his Grameen Bank of Bangladesh—and then expanded on these thoughts on an episode of WallStrip—the fans of microcredit went a bit berserk. So, of course, we’re coming back for more.

Today’s critique comes from Jeff Tucker of the Mises Institute. Now admittedly, Jeff has never been a fan of Grameen or Yunus. In the past he’s said that Grameen “is more of a cult than a financial institution” and said that “[a]t best, its operations are wasteful and Ponzi-like; at worst, they are parasitical, usurious, and communistic.”

So you won’t be surprised that Jeff hasn’t exactly been won over to Grameen by the Nobel Committee. Writing at the Mises Institute’s website, Jeff says:

We are told that Yunus discovered a wonderful new way of making profitable loans to the poor by doing something that all conventional bankers in Bangladesh had overlooked. Half the population lives below the poverty line in Bangladesh. Are we really supposed to believe that banks blithely overlooked millions of poor people out of bias or hatred or snobbery?

Even if we can accept that he had some sort of entrepreneurial insight that no one else had, Grameen has been giving loans to poor women for thirty years. Are we really supposed to believe that conventional bankers were so stupid as not to spot this opportunity even after decades of demonstration? Yunus says that he discovered that the poor are "bankable" but if this were true in the way that he says, others would have discovered the same profit opportunities and done it without help from government.

Actually, Grameen is not really free enterprise at all. Yunus's first pile of cash came from the United Nations. Then he went to the Bangladesh government. Then he went to US foundations. In the 1980s and '90s, the bank received nearly $150 million in grants. At the same time, he started borrowing at low interest rates from governments around the world, and lending out the same money at higher rates. His institution keeps the difference.

Microcredit or Macrowelfare: The Myth of Grameen [Mises.org]

One of the frustrating things about doing business in a region in turmoil is that it’s hard to know who to bribe. When gangsters or dictators run the place, you bribe them. When “democrats” are in charge it’s a little more difficult to know which palms need an application of grease, according to a "reulctant briber" featured in this article in the Economist.

Call him Ivan. When The Economist met him, on a flight from Moscow to Ukraine, Ivan was perplexed. Before the “orange revolution” of 2004, he said, “I knew who, when and how much” to bribe, on behalf of the small minerals company he co-owned in Ukraine. All the new talk of wiping out corruption was making business impossible. Ivan mostly works in Russia, his homeland. He is just the sort of small entrepreneur that the country needs to flourish, if its economy is to rely less on oil and gas, and its society to be stabilised by the growth of a middle class. Ivan has the strong stomach and dark sense of humour needed to survive the everyday perils of doing business in Russia. As he proved in a series of meetings over the last year, he is also enlighteningly candid.

Like many successful Russian businessmen, Ivan, who is in his 50s, had a scientific training, which meant he was not too exposed to Soviet indoctrination. He owes the once unthinkable lifestyle he now enjoys—foreign holidays, overseas education for his children—mostly to his dealings as a commercial-property developer. When The Economist saw him next, he was finishing a profitable project near Moscow. It was profitable not only for him. “It's like the last days of Pompeii,” he said of the bribe-taking that consumed roughly a tenth of his costs, the same proportion, he said, as criminals extorted in the 1990s.

Fortunately, we in the United States enjoy a much more stable system of corruption. We know exactly who to bribe. They’re called Congressmen. And the trick is to spread the wealth around as widely as possible, with a bias toward the Democratic Party. Yesterday’s New York Times carried this story on the performance of stocks and earnings from companies that make campaign contributions. There is a strong correlation between bribessupporting lots of congressional candidates, on the one hand, and better stock performance and earnings growth on the other. And the party that brings the best returns to corporations making political donations is the Democrats. (For some reason we can't fathom, the Times coverage of the study that produced these results left out the fact that paying off more Democrats is the more successful political investment strategy.)

So go long on those Democratic donors, kids.

The reluctant briber [Economist]

The Share-Price-to-Campaign-Contribution Ratio [New York Times]

We’re sort of obsessed with family firms. They’re intriguing because their persistence and success seem to go against the grain of so much contemporary thinking. Unlike in times past, people now are kind of uncomfortable with the idea that who you are and what you’re capable of depends on who you are related to. Sure, we all think it helps to be born with certain material “advantages” but there’s also the tendency to think that these problems can be ironed out with proper professional training and equality of opportunity. Discovering the business success might be a heritable trait is a bit discomfiting, to say the least.

A lot of people have a lot invested in the idea of the professional manager. Business schools, for instance. But as this review of business historian David S. Landes’ new book Dynasties points out, “the business-school mythos of the ‘professional manager’has led to a persistent underestimation of the importance of family firms. Fully a third of Fortune 500 companies can properly be characterized as family businesses, and on average they outperform the “professionally managed” firm by a surprisingly large margin.”

See? It really does matter who your daddy is. Except when it doesn't.

Old Money [New York Times]

Steve Sailer points us toward an entertaining interview between Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert and chemistry Nobel guy Peter Agre.

Colbert: "You said 'anyone who grew up on a farm knows that evolution exists'. Ok, are you saying a monkey can milk a cow?"

Agre: "Well, if I can milk a cow I suspect a monkey as smart as I am can milk a cow."

Colbert: "Are there monkeys as smart as you?"

Agre: "I'm sure there are quite a few, quite a few.

Colbert: "Oh really? mmhum. Do they give a Nobel prize for thowing your own faeces?"

Agre: "........That's the Economics prize, I think."