Interesting blog bits

1. Jerry O’Driscoll on Spending Is The Tax.
2. Brad Taylor on Claudia Williamson on Informal Institutions. Institutions matter but may not be easily transplanted.
3. Not PC on Effects of Auckland uber-city already being felt. Rational expectations?
4. Madsen Pirie on The exodus begins. Yes taxes do have incentive effects.
5. Adrian R. Bell, Chris Brooks and Tony Moore on The credit crunch of 1294: Causes, consequences and the aftermath. It is widely believed that the current credit squeeze, leading to bank failures, is a modern phenomenon arising from the interplay of a historically unique set of circumstances that could not have been foreseen. But a team of academics – a finance professor and two medieval historians – at the University of Reading’s ICMA Centre has documented a medieval credit crunch that bears remarkable parallels with the current crisis.
6. Greg Mankiw on Measuring Jobs Created or Saved. Mankiw asks "Going forward, what macroeconomic data would you have to observe before you concluded that the stimulus bill has been a failure? Or will you conclude, no matter how bad things get, that the economy would have been in even worse shape without the stimulus? And if the latter is the case, aren't these quarterly reports just a bit surreal?"
7. William Easterly on How ethnic profiling explains Dani Rodrik’s fondness for industrial policy . It's all about reversing conditional probabilities.