If you really care about poverty, you should overjoyed to learn that people can massively reduce poverty by slightly changing their behavior. Of course, this realization will also reduce our sympathy for people who refuse to change their behavior. And it should.

As Eminem wrote, “Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?” If the EU lets Greece default and write off a substantial amount of their debt, they would have seized the moment and forcibly dealt with the problem of too much debt. If the EU continues on the fantasy track of thinking Greece can get by with the buying of more time, the Euro zone experiment will ultimately fail.

Thus, according to the DOE, a maker of the 28-MPG 2011 Toyota Highlander Hybrid holds a “green-collar job,” but the maker of a 41-MPG 2011 Honda Civic Hybrid has a plain old blue-collar job.

…there is simply no justification for the artificially high prices on basic manufacturing inputs and consumer necessities (especially food, clothing and footwear) that American businesses and families must pay in order to subsidize the well-connected American industries that produce these artificially expensive products.

This aversion to ‘incomplete information’ games is related to, but different from, classical risk aversion, and probably explains why lenders are now so afraid to lend: if they make a mistake now, it won’t be merely a bad investment, but a crime.