Harvard Law School is hosting a conference entitled"The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology, and Consequences," on March 9, 2009. It is part of its"Project on Law and Mind Sciences," all sponsored by Harvard Law School.

I noticed that the previous years' conferences were not on the ideologies of other schools of economics, but perhaps future years' conferences will be. Anyone going?

"Bank bailout could cost $4 trillion," according to Fortune. It's good thing the feds are sitting on all that paper that they can print money with.

What began as a spoof has grown into a movement: According to the Chicago Tribune, a student who joked about wanting to start a student support and development group for men was inundated with requests from students that he do exactly that. So he has. It's called Men in Power.

A U of C representative said there are approximately nine women's advocacy groups on campus, but this would be the first men's advocacy group.

I wonder whether this will start a trend.

Here is a link to an interesting conversation between two George Mason University professors--Bruce Smith and Dan Klein--about the extent to which higher education is dominated by left-of-center politics, and what effects that has.

One snippet: Bruce Smith says that conservatives are not discriminated against in academia, adding that many of them are" crybabies." Right.

UPDATE 3/22/09: Two other Klein offerings on this topic:
1. An article in The Independent Review, entitled"Groupthink in Academia: Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Period," here.

2. A podcast of Klein with Russ Roberts on"Truth, Bias, and Disagreement," here.

Have you heard of this yet? It's published by"Free Range Studios." It's available in pieces on YouTube (of course). A student of mine alerted me to it. Here's the first installment:

UAW president Ron Gettelfinger argues that the $25 billion handout he is urging Congress to give to the Detroit-based auto manufacturers is in fact not a bailout: it's a"loan--a bridge loan."

He goes on to argue that the companies and the unions are working on financial plans that will ensure the long-term stability of the companies.

But if those both those claims were true, shouldn't they be able to convince a private bank or private investors to give them the"bridge loan"? If it were such a certainty that they would pay back the"borrowed" money plus interest, surely profit-minded investors would be interested to help them out. But curiously, they aren't.

Let's see: (1) If A, then B. (2) Not B. Therefore . . . .

That is the title of a column, and accompanying short video, from Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes Magazine.

Karlgaard argues not only that American innumeracy is worse than American illiteracy, not only that the innumerates actually worsen the lives of others while illiterates only worsen their own lives, but also that this pervasive and growing innumeracy in America might even have had something to do with the current banking crisis.

A scary thought.

Yale psychologist Alan Kazdin argues in Slate today that parents shouldn't spank children. He says studies find a host of negative consequences:

"The negative effects on children include increased aggression and noncompliance—the very misbehaviors that most often inspire parents to hit in the first place—as well as poor academic achievement, poor quality of parent-child relationships, and increased risk of a mental-health problem (depression or anxiety, for instance). High levels of corporal punishment are also associated with problems that crop up later in life, including diminished ability to control one's impulses and poor physical-health outcomes (cancer, heart disease, chronic respiratory disease). Plus, there's the effect of increasing parents' aggression, and don't forget the consistent finding that physical punishment is a weak strategy for permanently changing behavior."

Two quick thoughts about this. First, I wonder whether spanking, like any other parenting technique, might work better (or worse) for some children than others. We often want a single policy for all children, but since children differ widely in temperament, personality, and so on, it seems likely that no single policy would be appropriate in all cases.

Second, it is interesting to note that modern psychology seems to be catching up with . . . Herbert Spencer! Spencer argued in his 1851 Social Statics that children deserve the same respect as adults and are equally protected by the law of equal freedom; one consequence of this, he thought, is that corporal punishment of children--or what he called" coercive education"--is as unjust as slavery.