The Unbroken Window

My student Alex R. forwards me this absurdity, brought to you by the always worth reading Lenore Skenazy. I wonder where, possibly, people get conditioned to WANT to promote this sort of a thing? Instead of teaching students how to read and add, this is what they are learning. Great. If you’re considering getting a [...]

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There are generally three types of discrimination (actually four) that may result in some economic actors being left shorthanded (we can define that in future post, but for now just conjure up the mental image of a worker being paid less than he/she “should”).  These are: Employer discrimination: the owners of a firm treat individuals [...]

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I read an article recently about a grocery chain that has eschewed packaging. Ignore the inconvenience of such things, or the unsanitary nature of such things, or perhaps even the increase in resources that is very likely to result from "saving" on "wasteful" packaging … and consider another controversy that has been much talked about [...]

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… of Our Brains (you know, the instinct part, not the reason part). Here are two propositions that I don’t think stand that comfortably side-by-side, yet I see them discussed regularly by the same people. Proposition #1: If we allow free-trade with other countries (or even within a country), there will be a “race-to-the-bottom” in terms [...]

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Today continues the Reasonable People series seeking questions and answers on policy that’s desirable in a world not with zero government failure, but rather in a government functioning near the higher end of its realistic range of performance in a high-trust (and highly trustworthy) society. First question today: is there any federal highway spending that a reasonable [...]

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A logical first topic to connect the new Reasonable People series to my earlier posts on carbon taxes: what might a reasonable person advocate? At minimum the “no regrets” price for carbon is appropriate but probably the ideal is likely the median damage estimate among studies published in reputable journals. Deep uncertainty about the extent, effects, [...]

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For much of the 20th century, if one was to look at the share of national income that ended up in the pockets of “capitalists” versus in the hands of laborers, you would have seen something very surprising given the conventional wisdom. What you would have seen is that in evil, greedy, capitalist America, workers [...]

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If you were to ask a proponent of wind energy or solar energy or fairie-powered bicycle energy whether public subsidy of those industries was necessary, correct and relevant, I am pretty confident you’d hear a “yes.” I’d be really curious to see a rundown of the common reasons WHY those positions would be justifiable. Would [...]

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Wintercow’s post today brought this IOM poster to mind from Ezra Klein:   Hmm, it’s intriguing that best practices in health care would have so much to mimic from other (competitive!)  industries. There are good arguments a la Robin Hanson for cutting health spending in half, but they’re orthogonal to the boots-on-the-ground efficiencies that competition in health [...]

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A 1992 study by the Rand Institute for Civil Justice ("Superfund and Transactions Costs: The Experiences of Insurers and Very Large Industrial Firms") finds that 88% of the money paid between 1986 and 1989 by insurance companies to pay Superfund claims was administrative and legal while only 12% of the funds were allocated to mitigation of [...]

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