Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in You Can't Have it Both Ways on Jan 30th, 2012
To make sure we don’t get billed for late fees without being notified that something is going to be late, right? Yet why should there have to be a next time? Why should keeping an ordinary driver’s license up to date oblige anyone to deal with a government agency, in person or online? I hadn’t even […]
Posted in Education, Health Care on Jan 30th, 2012
John Goodman, summarizing the failure of the Medicare pilot programs to produce cost reductions, asks rhetorically: Can you think of any other market where the buyers of a product are trying to tell the sellers how to efficiently produce it? Great quote. I’d say that higher education gets close particularly if we take a generous […]
Posted in Macroeconomics on Jan 30th, 2012
Germane to our post earlier today, this new paper by Valerie Ramey (she’s found similar results in the past, something I will write about later on) finds that government spending multipliers are less than one (i.e. for every dollar of government spending, less than $1 of new economic activity is created) and that while government […]
Posted in Methodology, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Jan 30th, 2012
I am sure those of you who defend markets based on the logic of supply and demand or on the logic of trade and comparative advantage have encountered this reaction. I get this regularly of course, even after I move from the models to dramatic illustrations of how they have worked in practice and even […]
