saintlucid:

I still don't think publishers' blurbs count as rigorous scientific review, even if they come from Harvard University Press.

I never said it did.

But if you are indeed that impressed by Ivy League imprints, you might enjoy:

On Classical Economics (Yale University Press, 2006)

Say's Law: An Historical Analysis (Princeton University Press, 1972)

Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study. (Yale University Press, 2004)

As a professional book reviewer, I've reviewed over 300 books. I'm impressed by books, not imprints.

But you were dissing Altemeyer as a pseudoscientist. The purpose of that link and quote was to disabuse you of that notion.

HUP, YUP, OUP and PUP publish plenty of unremarkable books (along with many gems). But Of Pandas and People, not so much.

[me:] Libertarians really don't have a sense of humor, do they?

It's not that Paul -- she was just certain that your jest was completely below the Borscht belt.

Oy vey!

You got me!

Ven I vus a kid in da Catskills, my borscht vus always below my belt.

Apology accepted.

But I'd rather hear you laugh.

Mona:

@Paul R.

Milton Friedman was a disciple of Milton Berle. It all went horribly wrong one night in the Catskills.

Trust me. You don't want to know.

Milton Berle did not stare down generals during Vietnam-era congressional hearings and convince Nixon to abolish the draft. Neither did Berle formulate the negative income tax, which in micro version became the Earned Income Tax Credit. Friedman did both. But don't let your contempt for those you disagree impede your Rovian caricatures.

Libertarians really don't have a sense of humor, do they?

I wasn't mocking Friedman. I was gently mocking Conservativeslayer's ignorance--on your behalf, actually.

I'm not a Friedman fan. But I don't demonize him, either. In my obituary for Friedman, I wrote:

If Friedman seemed relatively untroubled by the suffering caused by his economic theories in the Third World, he was noticeably upset with the short shrift given to his libertarian views by the conservative movement, including his support for decriminalizing drugs.

“Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages,” he wrote in an open letter to then-drug czar Bill Bennett in 1990. “Had drugs been decriminalized 17 years ago, ‘crack’ would never have been invented (it was invented because the high cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to provide a cheaper version) and there would today be far fewer addicts.”

More recently, last July, Friedman said, "What's really killed the Republican Party isn't spending, it's Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression."

Finally, he wasn’t always opposed to government intervention, when markets failed to internalize true costs, for example. He supported London Mayor Ken Livingston’s proposal for a congestion fee for traffic in central London, and might well have supported container fees here in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

In short: His folly was enacted, while his wisdom was ignored.