Point Pleasant, West Virginia

Claudia is still waiting for just the right time to make her first post, so I thought I'd send along this news of her hometown, Point Pleasant, West Virginia. While I've never been, I hear Point Pleasant is the home of the infamous Mothman, as well as statues of both the Mothman and Chief Cornstalk.

Here's to West Virginia winning a beautification contest!

Congrats to Paul Krugman

An award well deserved, his centripetal versus centrifugal forces work in economic geography will increase in importance as the world becomes more globalized and prosperous.

Also, since my suspicion is that Nobel prize winning economists become more ideological and politically active after winning the award, the science won't lose as much quality research in this case. If we wanted to distribute the award in a maximizing scientific output manner, I think it is better to give it to someone who has already moved in that direction rather than someone still heavily involved in their research.

Diminishing Comment Quality

One of my all-time favorite posts at Marginal Revolution is on the quality deterioration of blog comments, where TC guesstimates that roughly the first 15 comments on a post are the best, after which quality takes a big downturn. Since reading this post, I have developed the habit of trying to skim the comments to see when comments "turn south."

Based on my experience, here is my ranking of the fastest deterioration of comment quality among the blogs I read. Note that I do not think bad comments are a reflection on the blog authors:

1. The Chronicle of Higher Education: By far the fastest depreciation of comments, which seem to almost always be from professors. Case in point, look at the comments on this post for a story on students with unprofessional email handles.
2. Freakonomics: I believe this is just because they are on the NYTimes website.
3. Megan McArdle's blog: However, this has drastically improved since she started moderating the comments. For whatever reason, she seems to draw a lot of venom from a fair portion of readers. Surprising to me given how good her posts usually are.

Atlas Unleashes Sir Antony Fisher Award on West Virginia

We're happy to report that Unleashing Capitalism has won the Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award for Best Traditional Publication! The award is given annually by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and is actually awarded to the Public Policy Foundation of West Virginia. Two of your bloggers, Justin Ross and Matt E. Ryan, contributed to the effort.

All in all, it has been an enjoyable process introducing and furthering the concepts of a free market society into West Virginia. We're surprised just how much latent free market support there actually is here! West Virginia is the benchmark example of what happens when government gets involved in a state's economy. On every conceivable margin-- economic performance, health, achievement, wealth, etc.-- West Virginia ranks at or near the bottom of the country. We have legislators that regulate every aspect of the economy and congressional representatives that shovel pork into our state. The results are crystal clear. It's not working.

Sadly, some people feel that the solution to too much government in West Virginia is...more government. Like many in the foreign aid community believe, it is not foreign aid-- or government, in our case-- that is the problem, just that it hasn't been done correctly up until this point. It's bad economics, blind of the simple economic litmus tests of incentives and information.

The bulk of the resistance to Unleashing Capitalism and the benefits of a free market economy have not come from those with an admittedly brief understanding of economic reasoning; these individuals have been genuine in their intake of the ideas, thoughtful in their challenges to them, and from our end, a joy to interact with.

Instead, the opposition has come from those with little economic clarity to speak of, yet are convinced otherwise. I am now certain that no worse harm can be done in the public arena than by an individual claiming economic scholarship when they have none. It is those that can write with the illusion of economic rationality, that can twist economic dead-ends into plausible solutions to our state's very real problems, that cause the most damage. Without a base level of economic rationale across the population of West Virginia, I feel this will be a battle that will continue to be fought. I am pleased, however, that Unleashing Capitalism is fighting the good fight to help educate West Virginians in proper economic reasoning.

Nearly 5,000 copies later, we couldn't be happier.

EDITED: The press release is here.