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Monday Morning – Nothing to See Here
March 7, 2016 Central Planning
  1. Saving the world one plastic bag at a time. Someone spent $3,000 on it, and among the initiatives include taking up more space on campus for additional bins to recycle these. I hope the replacement bags / resusable bags clean themselves.  Of course, the fact that many bags are thrown out is definitely proof that doing so is irresponsible.
  2. Designing fast trains to wrong stations. BTW, kudos to any environmental economics student who recognizes the problem with the first sentence in the abstract.
  3. Well, THEY may say they are surprised, but … “Interestingly, we find that these measures are only weakly, if at all, associated with the likelihood of being hired, suggesting considerable scope for improving teacher quality through the hiring process.” Those measures include performance in college and performance on a mock teaching lesson.
  4. What happens when you substantially raise the marginal tax rates on entrepreneurial effort and innovation? Ummm … nothing to see here. But that’s not how Americans will respond, after all, these disincentives are happening in …. Norway.

  5. Yet another macroeconomic trilemma: you can have big finance, financial bailouts and fiscal demand management policies together in unicorn-world. On earth, pick two.
"1" Comment
  1. #4–interesting, and works against my ham-handed biases (so, kudos!). I work in a University Tech Transfer office, and I’m curious who was paying patent costs for professors before, when the university had no stake in the outcome. At most US schools, the TTO pays all patent costs for professors, then cuts them in IF a deal gets done. This sort of speculative investment seems beyond the means (or at least should be) of a professor’s salary (or time out of the lab to raise funds), as costs can run into the $100K+ range. If the universities were paying costs and not taking any of the upside, that is generous, indeed.

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