Environmental Economics

State holiday

Dear env-econ.net Editor,

I'm not teaching my classes today (nor blogging) due to the State Holiday. This is a good day for a state holiday because I'm still hungover after the State Holiday Bunny visited my kids yesterday morning -- too much chocolate candy! Also, I need to catch up a bit at home because the State Holiday Holy Week activities took up a lot of my time last week.

Signed,

Grumpy Old Man

P.S. Either call it an Easter Holiday or don't have a friggin' holiday a week after Spring Break.

Throwdown!

From Mankiw's Blog:

Each year, I meet a number of highly promising students who were accepted by [MIT and Harvard] and are having trouble choosing between them. Here is my advice:

1. Don't sweat it. You will get a great education at either place.
2. Look up your favorite ranking of economists' productivity and look at which school has more faculty near the top. Those are the profs you want to hang around and learn to emulate.

For example, if you use this standard ranking and look at the top 50, you will learn that MIT has 3 and Harvard has 12.

That should settle the question.

Not quite.

Updated opinion poll

A "Breaking News Alert" from the NYTimes:

Mitt Romney is quitting his campaign for president, having made the final decision last night, according to a campaign source who asked to remain anonymous.

Romney only received 7% in the env-econ.net reader opinion poll, 3% behind "none of the above," so this is likely a good decision on his part. Click on the thumbnail ...

The new poll, sans Romney, is posted. It is reset so you can vote all over again. We'll continue this farce, er, exercise, throughout the election season (yawn).