The Unbroken Window

The Government University at Binghamton is cutting back on its nursing program. It must be the case that there is no interest in nursing, and that there is not some big national crisis about the state of health care in America. Therefore, there is no need to keep such wasteful programs around when you could [...]

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George Akerlof’s canonical example of the market for lemons (information asymmetries leading to unraveling in free markets with subsequent welfare losses) seems to be a perfect illustration of the problem of asymmetric information. Ironically, just as what has happened in the canonical descriptions of public goods problems (lighthouses and honey bees), market power (oil cartels), [...]

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When I teach intermediate microeconomics I talk a little about the history of conscription in the United States and then help the students understand how to model out the true economic costs of raising a military via a draft versus raising a military of volunteer soldiers.
Some of my students, in particular those with family in [...]

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A common justification for government confiscation of privately produced wealth is that many of us are selfish free-riders. To take one example, let’s think of the charity market. Under one view of charity, the one I espouse, is that charitable activities should remain purely in the private domain. If private individuals wish to contribute to [...]

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Well, I guess 6,000 divided by 40,000 now exceeds 50%. After all, when kids spend all their time gardening instead of learning math, should we be surprised that when they become adults, they don’t know what a majority is?
Here is a short video on the forced unionization of daycare providers in Michigan.

This naked theft has [...]

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From Mark Perry:
The highest paid city government employee of Madison, Wisconsin, last year wasn’t the mayor.  It wasn’t the police chief.  It wasn’t even the head of Metro Transit.  It was bus driver John E. Nelson, says the Wisconsin State Journal.

Nelson earned $159,258 in 2009, including $109,892 in overtime and other pay.

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I highly recommend one of Arnold Kling’s latest books, Unchecked and Unbalanced. It is a short, highly readable and lucid presentation of the structural problems with government in a wealthy, large and dispersed modern society. The central thesis is that there is a divergence between knowledge (which is largely decentralized and virtually impossible to aggregate) [...]

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A number of environmental organizations spend a majority of their resources lobbying in Washington (e.g. the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Parks Conservation Association, etc.).  In a recent mailing I learned that upwards of 90% of my annual monetary contributions to these groups are used to lobby and [...]

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Yesterday the New York Times ran a piece describing Professor Bill Baumol’s “cost disease” problem in economics. Very simply, the theory says that some sectors that are labor intensive would be expected to have its costs increase faster than less labor intensive sectors because productivity improvements are harder to come by when lots of human [...]

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Fortunately there are some good things that come with age. I understand that it does not make any sense to try to make everyone happy. I also am becoming better at ignoring static noise. But these things nonetheless still feel like fingernails scratching on chalkboards.
In several conversations with current and past students and seeking feedback [...]

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