April102013
This is a pretty good overview of some work Justice Posner has been doing with Lee Epstein and William Landes to “provide a comprehensive, numbers-filled assessment of judicial voting patterns.” It’s a good read, especially the bit where they compare and contrast voting patterns in the Supreme Court to the District Courts. A related work would be Posner’s 2005 Harvard Law Review article “A Political Court.”
July72012
“I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy.”
Richard Posner, speaking to NPR.
June172012
“We add that the appellants’ brief is rambling, and would be more effective if compressed to 14,000 words.”
Richard Posner. Most of the time we like to talk about Judge Posner’s great legal work, his insightful economic commentary, or other academic work. Sometimes, we just love his most awesome legal retorts.(Source: abovethelaw.com)
June162012
“Say’s Law, rather confusingly paraphrased as supply creates its own demand, treats money as a medium of exchange and a standard of value, but nothing more. This is essentially a barter theory of the economy. But modern economies are not barter economists. In a modern economy, receiving money in exchange for some good or service doesn’t dictate that you exchange the money forthwith for some other good or service. You can save the money indefinitely. If you put it under your mattress, it makes no contribution to productive activity. Similarly, money can pile up in Federal Reserve Banks if people are disinclined to spend, without contributing to economic activity.”
Richard Posner, The Federal Reserve and the World Economic Crisis
June152012
“If banks are reluctant to lend and consumers to borrow, increasing the supply of money will not lead to a big increase in borrowing. Instead the banks will use the money to buy Treasury securities, which are riskless assets. The money will go in a circle: the Treasury will buy securities from banks, and banks will use the money to buy securities from the Treasury. Or the Treasury will buy securities from nonbank owners of them, who will deposit the proceeds in banks, which will use the additional cash to buy Treasury securities or increase cash reserves. This is an exaggeration, but can help one to see why increasing the money supply need not increase productive activity.”
Richard Posner, The Federal Reserve and the World Economic Crisis
March42012
“The Amazon business model, though revolutionary, is visibly in the line of descent from mail-order businesses such as Sears Roebuck. It is a system for the efficient distribution of existiing products. The e-book is a new product in one sense, though in another sense it is merely a new channel for distributing the content of books. It is not yet apparent what advantages e-books have over print books except for travelers, other than easier ordering and faster delivery even of printed books from Amazon.”
Richard Posner, in this wonderful post about Bookstores, Libraries, and eBooks. A friend of mine runs ‘The Kindle Monologues’ which roughly espouses my own personal views on eBooks and how they are a good thing for readers and authors in general.
February272012
“But naïve extrapolation with respect to national economies is treacherous, as Becker points out with the examples of Japan and the Soviet Union, though the examples are slightly different: Japan was growing rapidly, and then stopped; the Soviet Union had stopped growing rapidly when (in our 1960 presidential election, for example) we began fearing that it was growing more rapidly than the U.S. The Soviet Union was about to enter the era of stagnation associated with the Brezhnev years.”
Richard Posner, Will China Overtake Us? Another great quote is later in the article:
To some extent this adjustment will take place independently of Chinese monetary policy. As wages of Chinese workers in the export sector rise, exports by other nations become more competitive, reducing Chinese exports, beginning a painful transition to a consumer society.
(Source: becker-posner-blog.com)
November202011
“The police I think made a tactical mistake in routing the “Occupiers” from Zuccotti Park near Wall Street. That is the lesson of the 1960s. Arrests, whacking demonstrators with billy clubs, dragging screaming women to paddy wagons, and other police just create anger, martyrdom complexes, and sympathy for the demonstrators. The Occupiers had made the mistake of—occupying urban spaces (in imitation of the Egyptians who occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo), rather than marching in them. The occupations attracted criminals, panhandlers, and lunatics, and created unattractive, unsanitary conditions.”
Richard Posner, on Occupy Wall Street and the Police reaction to the protests. I like Posner’s response here because it suggests that neither party is lilly white in the situation. Further, I tend to agree with a closing statement of his:
Railing against income inequality, job loss, and banking abuses is thus understandable, but it doesn’t do any good. The “Occupiers” are anarchic and disruptive, and the solid middle of American society, which rejects the Tea Party because of its goofy ideas, is likely to reject the Occupy movement because of its style, while broadly sympathetic to its antipathies.
One of the faults of the post, though, is that he later compares a brief editorial written by two members of the Occupy movement with the (in)famous Port Huron Statement—an incredibly more voluminous work—of the largely unlamented Students for a Democratic Society. Although we can argue about the positive and negative impact of the SDS (and the significantly more malignant Weather Underground the grew from it), it is fair to say that the Port Huron Statement was a manifesto with defined ideas and a clarity of purpose. I am not sure the same can be said for any Occupy transmission.
