Links

Just some things I've ripped off from other bloggers this morning.

1. Against Monopoly notes the declining prices and increasing innovations in the market for illicit drugs and wonders if the government were to subject illicit drugs to the kind of patent regulations that legal drugs get, if we wouldn't see the opposite trends - rising prices and falling innovations.

2. Malcolm Gladwell writes about David Galenson in next week's New Yorker. Galenson has, for the last ten years or more, written almost exclusively about the economics of art, and specifically artists and art-styles, providing a tremendous amount of evidence that certain types of thinkers peak at different ages, in terms of the quality of their output. Some artists are like fine wines and improve with age (eg, Pollock), and some artists are like bright flashes of phosphorous and do brilliant work at very early ages (e.g., Warhol). (hattip to kottke)

3. Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama and calls McCain a bunch of names. Probably will be a piece I refer to occasionally as I continue to think about Obama.

4. An old piece on the rise and fall of development economics by Paul Krugman. (Hattip to Blattman)