I'm at the IHS "Liberty and Society" seminar this week. A few notes on the last couple of days:

1. Special collections librarians are awesome. Thanks to the staff at UMass-Amherst for help with the collections on Friday.

2. The pizza at Antonio's in Amherst is truly excellent. For those who lament the allegedly homogenizing consequences national/global integration, I have to wonder what would be lost, socially, if Antonio's were to open a location in Memphis.

3. The drive from Great Barrington to Bryn Mawr (mostly through eastern NY) is beautiful. We tried to find a gas station at an exit for FDR's birthplace and presidential library yesterday; unfortunately the station identified by our Garmin no longer exists (coincidence?).

4. We paid over $4.50/gallon for gas yesterday. My back-of-the-envelope estimate of the optimal (additional) Pigou tax is no more than $0.00.

5. At the end of my "Economics in One Lesson" talk last night, I asked student discussion groups to make economic cases for and against recycling. All the groups made excellent points. The more I think about it the more I am convinced that recycling programs constitute very costly ways to achieve ambiguous (or negative) environmental benefits. To the extent that we produce too much waste, I'm inclined to believe that it is because garbage collection isn't priced efficiently. One could make plausible public good and natural monopoly arguments for government garbage collection, but one could make the same argument for government-provided lawn care.