Economics professor Jeffrey Miron wants to buy black tar heroin, legally. Now. In a powerfully argued CNN editorial, Dr. Miron breaks down how making drugs--all drugs--legal and regulated would solve war, cancer, taxes, government corruption, racial profiling, AIDS and, presumably, difficult-to-open jars.

The last time we checked in with Crimson druglust it was just blow for the good of science. This time, the good Harvard prof is reading the blood on the wall, and he does not mince words: legalization is "the only way to reduce violence." Miron's hook is the horrifying Mexican drug wars--our thank-you gift for taking the bad jobs we need back now, please--but his real target is the U.S. government's "puritanical policies" and "draconian [...] enforcement."

Miron may be gilding your stoner ex-roommate's opinions with vocabulary and rhetoric, but he's still completely right, right? If we'd lost the war on drugs any more emphatically we'd call it Vietnam Cubed, but Congress is dedicated to bogarting our chemical fun. That said, considerable evidence suggests that, eventually, all the lame Americans who vote for lame Americans who hate weed will die (and even now, there may be hope).

After all, drugs are a personal, almost philosophical choice, and they feel totally great at the time--like cutting. The professor calls it the "victimless nature of this so-called crime." Who's worse off if The Man condones methadone Mondays, other than everyone who cares about you?

Dr. Miron says it best: "Obeying the law is for suckers."

Now that we're officially in a recession and everyone's throwing around words like "death of the middle class," "what job market?" and "SPAM for every meal", perhaps you're having trouble keeping track of all the bad news. We're here to give you the rundown, Ivy-style. In this afternoon's installment of Recession Watch '08: Harvard is out $8 billion! Brown makes like Dartmouth and Cornell and imposes a hiring freeze! And Columbia looks to sell its private equity holdings (maybe)!

This morning, the New York Times reported that Harvard's endowment has lost $8 billion, or 22 percent of its value, in the last four months. In a letter to the deans, University President Drew Faust and Executive Vice President Edward C. Forst '82 said that the total loss in value will likely be closer to 30 percent by June, the end of the current fiscal year. Harvard's endowment is the largest in the country, and the $8 billion loss alone is larger than the endowment value of all but four other American universities (Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT). Read the rest of this entry »

A Harvard professor of economics has just released the fifth edition of Principles of Economics, a bestselling introductory economics textbook, and all across the world trees and and students have been falling in equal measure: the former have been severed by chainsaw-wielding maniacs in stump-filled ravines; the latter have been collapsing in their dormitories for want of sustenance, an entire month's pittance diverted from the cafeteria to the campus bookstore, to fill the coffers of a grinning, bespectacled Bostonian.

On Greg Mankiw's blog, of course, there is no mention of the money the professor will reap from the newest iteration of his textbook, which is selling on Amazon for a whopping $178.89. In a post dated to Saturday, October 11, Mankiw writes:

Why a new edition? The fundamentals of economics are much the same: Supply curves still slope up, and demand curves still slope down. But a lot has changed over the past three years, and the new edition covers recent developments in economic research, events, and policy. In particular, it includes over 40 new applications, including Case Studies and In the News boxes, to remind students that economics is about the world in which they live.

Indeed, much has changed in the past three years. (For example, look at how all those economic theories helped the Fed prevent our economy from tanking). But really, Mankiw, the readers of your introductory economics textbook are not the same Ivory Tower academes that receive a dozen canary-colored working papers from NBER each month. They'll survive without 40 new applications, thank you very much.

When asked by email to detail the changes he made from the fourth edition to the fifth, Mankiw was not extremely helpful. He wrote: "contact brian joyner, who I mentioned on my blog post. he can give you some information." The fact that Mankiw directed me to someone at the publisher of his textbook leads me to wonder whether he knows what he changed at all.

After the jump: an approximation of Mankiw's rake on every textbook.

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