The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in Economic Illiteracy on Aug 31st, 2010
Via John Stossel: The city of Cleveland operates a public grocery store called the West Side Market. It boasts organic foods, unique specialty items, and personal service (the DMV boasts that too, you have to deal personally with them). It looks quite nice from the pictures. But typical of government it is only open for [...]
Posted in Institutions on Aug 31st, 2010
Megan McArdle commenting on how “natural” polyamory is (as some evolutionary biologists exclaim): Rape seems to be pretty “natural”, but I’d still like to build social institutions that fight this “natural instinct”. I don’t have any nits to pick on the topic of monogamy, I am thinking, rather, of how one can apply Megan’s thought [...]
Posted in Education, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Aug 31st, 2010
Briefly consider a mantra of the progressive left: “that if people had to provide for the education of their own children, many children would go without schooling.” Regular readers know that the history of education in this country certainly does not bare this idea out. But what of today? We seriously cannot run any policy [...]
Posted in Employment on Aug 30th, 2010
In new NBER working paper we read that: … Using the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists against Israeli targets between the years 2000 and 2006 we provide evidence on the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit more educated, [...]
Posted in Institutions, Methodology on Aug 30th, 2010
An old good friend of mine from college posted on Facebook the other day: 1 military suicide every 36 hours; current prevention programs are not working: http://tiny.cc/9tx05 Clicking through to the referenced link you see the actual data: The report noted that from 2005 to 2009, more than 1,100 servicemembers committed suicide—an average of 1 [...]
Posted in Flotsam and Jetsam on Aug 29th, 2010
They had a special shelf out with selected books on it that have not been borrowed for 5 years (or something like that, I forget the time). None of those books appear to be interesting to me. So that leaves me wondering, would you prefer it if your library did more of this? And if [...]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy on Aug 28th, 2010
A friend of a good friend reminds me that: If you are a doctor who accepts Medicare payments, you cannot offer your services to non-Medicare patients at a lower cost, even if they’re uninsured … HT: Tim Bastian
Posted in Welfare State on Aug 27th, 2010
That’s why the plunders of the past decided to do one of two things. (1) Move on to plunder someone else. (2) Stay put and allow their hosts to live so that there was still something to plunder in the future. The public employees and retirees are doing neither. Is it wrong for me to [...]
Posted in Government Thuggery on Aug 27th, 2010
This is truly incredible (I linked to it in an earlier post): The chips will allow city workers to monitor how often residents roll carts to the curb for collection. If a chip show a recyclable cart hasn’t been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables. [...]
Posted in Economics Problems on Aug 27th, 2010
A market is something which emerges through the actions of everyone but the design of no one. They are part of what Hayek called the extended order of human cooperation. Recognizing the fact that markets themselves are not consciously created, but that they offer myriad benefits to participants and non-participants alike, raises many questions. Two [...]
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