Bryan Caplan had a great post last week combining statistics, biology, and parenting to lead to the conclusion that weird people should have more kids.  First, the statistics. If there is a zero correlation between parental and child traits then your child is as likely to be as similar to you as is a stranger. If the correlation between parent and child traits is greater than zero then you are more likely to be like your child than a stranger but only if you yourself are not normal. Here is Bryan:

Take a look:
 

		Parent-Child Correlation
		r= 0		r=.5
	You	Stranger	Child	Stranger	Child
Percentile/ Expected Percentile	50th	50th	50th	50th	50th
	95th	50th	50th	50th	80th
	99.99th	50th	50th	50th	95th

Notice that regardless of the value of r, normal people can expect to be like their kids.  But that's not saying much, because normal people can expect to be like any random person they meet!  The story's very different for weirdos.  By definition, weirdos never have much in common with random strangers.  With a zero parent-child correlation, weirdos will feel equally alienated from their children.  As the parent-child correlation rises, however, weirdos' incompatibility with strangers stays the same, but their expected compatibility with their children gets stronger and stronger.

Now let's look at these facts like a mad economist.  There are two ways to surround yourself with people like you.  One is to meet them; the other is to make them.  If you're average, meeting people like yourself is easy; people like you are everywhere.  If you're weird, though, meeting people like yourself is hard; people like you are few and far between.  But fortunately, as the parent-child correlation rises, weirdos' odds of making people like themselves get better and better.

...The lesson: As your weirdness increases, so does your incentive to have kids.  If you like football and American Idol, you're never really alone.  You don't need to build a Xanadu for yourself.  But if you're a lonely misfit, oddball, freak, or weirdo, then find a like-minded spouse and make new life together.  Let the normals laugh at you.  You'll have each other.

Apologies to Alex Tabarrok for lifting his entire post, but I couldn't find a way to excerpt it that would do it justice. Let me just say that if you read only one blog, it should be Rhymes With Clown. If you read a second, it should be Marginal Revolution.

Washington has been flooded with deficit reduction plans of late. They have different ideological shapes, but most require everyone to sacrifice something they want. That wasn't how this deal came together. Both sides agreed to give each other largely what they wanted. It is financed entirely by adding to the national debt. (Whee!)

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my children (and grandchildren) for allowing my government to continue spending like there's no tomorrow and not paying to for it. Thanks.

I entertained the notion GOP gains in 2010 & 2012 would change the attitude in Washington toward spending. I'm wondering now if it's only the bond market that can do so.

5. The differential payment rates across Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance are becoming unsustainable more quickly than I had anticipated; see for instance the link in #4.  Further reforms will be required more quickly than had been anticipated, but it's not obvious how such reforms should proceed.  It's hard to either upgrade the Medicaid (and Medicare) rates or to downgrade the private insurance rates.  Monitor this one closely, because it is likely to prove the breaking point of our health care status quo, with or without the Obama plan.  (This is our version of the ticking time bomb within the eurozone, namely that natural rates of growth split apart a distortion, increasingly, over time.)

6. I am less worried about mandate enforcement than I used to be; Austin Frakt has had good posts on this at TheIncidentalEconomist, see here.

7. I am more worried about employers shedding employees onto the subsidized exchanges than I used to be; Reihan Salam has had good posts on this topic and how it could prove to be a fiscal breaking point for the new law.  You can argue that this is the actual long-run restructuring plan, but unless we are willing to go the "Medicaid for all reimbursement rates" route, I don't see how we afford it.

That's Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution. Be sure to check out the link for all nine of his points which constitute a sober assessment of where things stand with the health reform.

Is #5 an argument for or against the "Medicare for All" strategy? I'd say against, at least if we want to continue to demand the level of medical services we currently do. Say we adjusted all payment rates down to current Medicare rates, what would be the effect on supply? If you believe the AMA, it would be dire.

WRT #7 I was of the opinion that real health insurance reform should have eliminated the current system of employer provided insurance. Obamacare instead made this relationship stronger, at least notionally.

As Cowen mentions, perhaps one of the unintended consequences of the reform will be to weaken the link between employment and insurance. If removing this link really is key to fixing health insurance in this country, then it would appear we are taking a long, slow, painful route to get to that point.

But people who follow politics closely — whether voters, activists or pundits — are often partisans first and ideologues second. Instead of assessing every policy on the merits, we tend to reverse-engineer the arguments required to justify whatever our own side happens to be doing. Our ideological convictions may be real enough, but our deepest conviction is often that the other guys can’t be trusted.

That's NY Times columnist Ross Douthat. While he's sometimes dimssied because he writes for the NYT, I would remind the reader that just because he's an anointed conservative doesn't mean he isn't correct in what he writes.

In this case, I'd say he hits the nail on the head and I don't think anyone should be afraid of a little self-reflection to test Douthat's hypothesis.

Be sure to check out the link to read the whole thing. You might be surprised to read his conclusion about whether this state of affairs is a good thing or a bad thing.

The next step in tightened security could be on U.S. public transportation, trains and boats.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for U.S. vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary.

“[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through,” Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on "Charlie Rose."

“I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime. So, what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?”

I'm really surprised it took this long for someone to raise the question of where the full body scan, or it's substitute the enhanced pat down, would show up next. I really don't think it takes a criminal mastermind to make the leap from attacking planes to attacking trains.

The thing about demand for plane rides is that there aren't that many good substitutes. So higher costs of plane trips, in the form of humiliating security protocols, may not do that much to deter passengers.

A train ride from Milwaukee to Madison, by comparison, has a very close substitute in a nation that is centered around automobiles.

If you think the economics of HSR is bad now, try to imagine the cash flow of an operation where ridership is depressed as people try to avoid what they believe to be overly intrusive security measures.

Ezra Klein argues that conservatives are right on this. “[Earmarking] feeds D.C.‘s massive lobbying complex, and in general, it’s not a wise way to spend federal money,” he writes. It is true, lobbyists lobby Congress way more often than they lobby agencies. But lobbyists can and do lobby agencies, and as agencies get more power over the federal budget under the moratorium, they will undoubtedly start lobbying the agencies more. The earmark moratorium will not curtail the lobbying complex, it will change how and where lobbyists do their work. When Congress has passed limited moratoriums in the past, this is exactly what has happened.

In fact, lobbyists looking for funds might prefer working with agencies because, unlike Congress, the people making decisions in agencies are not accountable to an electorate. They’ll also still be able to lobby members of Congress to lobby agencies and ask for money to be spent on their pet projects. Believe it or not, this happens, and it’s totally secretive and undisclosed.

With Mitch McConnell finally getting the hint, we will see a vote on the DeMint proposal to ban earmarks.

While I'm for it, I don't think it is a panacea. I also take seriously the chance that there could be some perverse outcomes from the ban. Something that, on its face, has merit.

When I posted a link on Twitter on Facebook yesterday to the first bill scheduled for a vote in the Senate lame duck session — the Promoting Natural Gas and Electric Vehicles Act of 2010 — people asked a good question: why, given the time restraints and all the important issues that need to be dealt with, is this bill getting the first vote?

One possible answer is that the vote is part of a straight-up quid pro quo (via an Oct. 6 piece from subscription-only Roll Call):

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens said Wednesday he thinks that Sen. Harry Reid will be able to move an alternative fuels subsidy bill in a lame-duck session in part because of Pickens’ promise not to make campaign contributions this cycle

For my pre-Vatican II brethren, would this be quid pro nihil?

Ludeman said mature firms in particular learn to do more with less during a recession - and those are the types of companies that dominate Wisconsin.

"Our economic development polices have not brought the new gazelles, the new technology firms into Wisconsin," he said. "We've more relied on our older firms, and they're not going to give us the same bounce-back."

Walker is talking about changing that. Along with adding 250,000 new jobs, he has said he will develop strategies for creating 10,000 new businesses by 2015.

That, however, could be even harder than increasing the jobs.

According to Census Bureau surveys, from 2002 through 2007 - five years of an expanding economy - Wisconsin added about 3,100 business establishments with employees. That amounted to growth of 2.3%.

The growth for the United States as a whole during that period: 25.9%.

This is from a JS article on Walker's promise to deliver 250,000 new jobs, but this portion is really more about Jim Doyle's tenure than the outlook for Walker's.

Ludeman is a retired labor economist for the state.

So if QE2 has already done what it's going to do, does that mean that our problems are already solved? Certainly not, because our problems were much bigger than any of the weapons in the Fed's limited arsenal. I do think that QE2 may be modestly helpful in terms of making credit more available to small businesses, encouraging a little more refinancing to enable more spending, encouraging net exports, and breaking the deflationary psychology that may have been a factor in so much cash sitting idle.

More than that, I do not ask or expect from the Fed.

That's Professor Hamilton at Econbrowser.