Michael O'Hare

Nestlé, for whom I have no brief regarding any of their businesses, is being attacked for bottling water in California during our historic drought; right perp, wrong charge.  I guess water conservation needs symbolic, inconsequential rituals, but I worry that doing silly things in the name of a good cause can be ill-advised. Restaurants are […]

That was a bromide the NRA spammed around in its literature back when I was learning about firearms as a pre-teen.  Having no interest in or experience with booze, I found it confusing; now it makes a lot of sense, whether or not the slogan actually affects anyone’s behavior.  Gun violence is mostly just one […]

Lead is a cruel joke of the creator.  It’s an extraordinarily useful metal: weatherproof, malleable, easy to solder and cast.  It’s soft enough not to mess up rifle barrels, and dense enough to make good fishing sinkers, bullets, and shot.  It’s abundant and easy to refine from ore. Lead oxide is extremely white and easy […]

My late colleague Bob Leone used to teach that good managers don’t try to avoid risk, because it’s impossible: they try to choose the right risks.  Parents are violating this rule left and right, and clueless, nitwit, busybody bureaucrats in Montgomery County (not to mention other parents who call the cops instead of just asking […]

I have wrung my hands in the past, in this space and elsewhere, about the collapse of a workable market for digital goods.  I find it hard to get people as excited about this as I am–if I still had enough hair for anyone to notice it would be on fire–but I have some help […]

Most societies have exerted control of individuals they find dangerous by threatening to make the remaining life of a criminal miserable, or to simply confiscate it. This works well enough (with plenty of opportunity to improve existing practices): people with evil intent mostly think they will be caught and punished, or killed in the process […]

Does anyone at the Washington Post read their Op-Eds before they go up? Like, a quick check for coherence and plausibility?  Today we have the Heritage Foundation’s chief economist (really) getting everything about the Laffer Curve wrong. OK, let’s go over it again, time to rewhack the zombie.  The LC is a graph of government […]

The University of Michigan is a great institution, probably the second or third best public university in the world.  I did not realize how great it is until today, when I found it has such a surplus of brilliant faculty, and such prosperous students who don’t need to borrow a penny to graduate right on […]

John Bewick, for whom I worked when he was Secretary of Environmental Affairs in Massachusetts, died this morning, surrounded by his family and celebrated by his friends. With all due respect to my various deans and chairs, I think John was the best boss I ever had, and a week doesn’t go by that I […]