We hate hospitals and medical care because “they” charge prices that are too high, especially for “important stuff.” We hate Walmart because “they” charge too little. And no, people do not have theories of positive and negative external costs to justify holding both positions. In other news, I just received a notice from New York [...]
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Posted in Price System, Resources on Apr 10th, 2013
Perhaps this post should run on Earth Day. According to economic models of climate change, a warming of the planet will result in a reduction of “our” well being. Before I get to my point today notice that this argument also requires being clear about whether we are considering aggregate effects or individual ones. For [...]
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It’s Goldi-Locks economic methodology by the left. Sometimes methodological individualism is evil (like when folks like myself assert that there is no “we”) but sometimes it is essential. Here is a summary of the controversy over the President’s Budget which is suggesting we index social security benefits to a chained CPI rather than the traditional [...]
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Posted in Price System on Apr 4th, 2013
Just a public service announcement, that’s all for today. Or here’s another fun thought from a mathematics friend of mine: “there are only 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand computer code and those who do not.”
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We have two stories. First, from my campus, where we are spending money, apparently, to put up pictures to remind people to shut off the lights. I love the title of that piece. EVERY green project shows promise, doesn’t it. Here is a short excerpt: However, before any real conclusions can be drawn, a more [...]
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I see no reason why any particular group of employees in this country is adored or idolized more than any other. I don’t, for example, pay any special attention to a school teacher or a soldier than I would my electrician. Indeed, I find this reasonable given that I’d like to evaluate people on their [...]
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Posted in Price System on Mar 20th, 2013
Perhaps more elusive than the (__insert favorite analogy here___), is the mythical Giffen good in economics. A Giffen good is simply one that elicits backward behavior on the part of actors. When the good gets more expensive, consumers respond by increasing their purchases of that good. These are very rare phenomenon, if they exist at all. The [...]
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Posted in Environment, Price System on Mar 12th, 2013
Among the many reasons folks wish to see more renewables development in the energy sector is that it is believed that generating, say, 25% of our electricity from wind and solar, rather than from gas, or generating half of our vehicular energy from electric (and hence wind and solar) rather than oil, would reduce our [...]
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I just perused this report for a short section in class I have next week (see table 5). This is a table showing workplace injury rates (full disclosure: if you examine the table for mortality you get dramatically different results, a point we may address shortly). The annual workplace injury rate for people working in oil and [...]
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Posted in Politics, Price System on Feb 6th, 2013
I have come to the belief that the asymptotic value of consumer surplus in societies with blob-like governments is zero. To illustrate, it would take a LOT more taxes and regulation here in Rochester before I seriously considered moving for that reason alone. Yikes? or Not?
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