Morning roundup

• Mankiw's syllabus for his freshman seminar at Harvard. Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter is on the list.


• Jeremy Clarkson on the horrors of the Canadian health care system


• One reason salaries differ across academic disciplines: supply and demand. Here's the view from inside a philosophy search committee. Economics isn't all that different except that the number of applicants is smaller and your department's top picks are likely to have competing offers.


• Mexico and Argentina decriminalize minor drug possession, Washington shrugs. Pragmatic reason usually given against decriminalization or legalization is that the US would slap down a trade embargo. Red herring.

  Canadians who have argued that the adoption of a harm-reduction approach here would jeopardize our trade relationship with the United States can therefore pipe down for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, we greet the occasion with a law-and-order he-man Conservative government in place -- one which, whatever its virtues when it comes to crimes that have victims, is full of people like Peter van Loan, Rob Nicholson and Tony Clement, and plenty of others who are about as likely to give birth to a muskox on the steps of Parliament as they are to support rational drug policy. From that standpoint, our timing sorta stinks.