Assault of Thoughts - 4/11/2014

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK

- Grant McDermott has a very even-handed post on the long-term prospects of natural gas as a bridge fuel here (his post on short term effects of the boom in North Dakota and elsewhere is here). This is a perfect practical application of the role of uncertainty and what we might call animal spirits (Grant's got 'em - others don't) in thinking about long-term investments.

- Gene has an excellent review of Madison and Jefferson here. If you've been following his discussion of the book on his blog a lot of this is familiar. I especially liked the discussion of slavery and the discussion of original intent. It makes me yearn for the summer when I can put down the textbooks and articles and read a little history again.

- Brad DeLong does some intriguing searches on James Buchanan's writings. This is not the be-all-end-all, but like Brad I find this intriguing. He finds no evidence that a man deeply interested in political economy and the institutions that shape our lives wrestled all that much with the public problems around race. So I'll make an appeal to readers: does anyone know if there's anywhere that Buchanan dealt with this that maybe isn't coming up in Brad's search?

- Not a link, but speaking of the economics of race, I just got my copy of the four volume Encyclopedia of Race and Racism in the mail yesterday. I wrote the article on "labor markets". It's a pretty book - I never saw proofs for this one... always exciting to see a Word document transformed into something beautiful.