1. UC Berkeley Professor David Kirp has written an interesting sociology piece claiming that requiring affordable housing in Mount Laurel, New Jersey was a winning social project. He claims that the suburban incumbent wealthy suffered no empirical impacts (for example home prices didn't fall) while the 140 households who moved into affordable housing there benefited in many ways. Note that the legal ruling shifts property rights giving the town the responsibility of providing that housing rather than allowing the owners of housing to sell to those who are willing to pay the most for it (i.e free market transactions). Professor Kirp then goes on to extrapolate that this case study "shows" that this policy should be expanded in other jurisdictions. Whether this inference follows from this nice case study merits some investigation.
2. There is an obituary for Roger Richman . Richman represented the interests of dead celebrities whose images are used for crazy fun permutations of boring products such as T-shirts. So if some young entrepreneur wants to put this Albert Einstein's photo on a t-shirt, who gets the profits? Who has the property rights to the memory of the dead celebrity? In this Wild West, Richman was a leader in establishing these property rights.
