Academic etiquette, e-communism, onshoring and home run distributions

Some more links from around the world of economics and beyond:

• 1. Academic etiquette: Are economists rude and trying to sneak values in the back door? Prominent econo-blogger Brad de Long makes contributions on both the appropriate etiquette on interrupting speakers and the long-standing quarrel about economics as a value free social science, in response to views expressed by social science colleagues in sociology and philosophy. The former strays at length onto the topic of the Great Famine, FYI.

• 2. A really interesting article in Wired about how much of the modern economy is based on communism (or at least collectivism).

• 3. On VoxEU, Richard Baldwin – a Krugman disciple (literally!) – discusses the importance of counting ‘onshoring’ when looking at the employment cost of ‘offshoring’.

• 4. Finally, quirky correlation of the day – and presumably variant of the power rule of some sort – goes to Carpe Diem’s home run and income distribution correlation.