Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in Competition, Economic Illiteracy on Jul 19th, 2011
Suppose you run a business of your own. Maybe you make beautiful Adirondack Guide Boats. Now these boats are gorgeous and extremely well crafted. A simple model will run you about $5,000. You can get them rigged up with a mast and sail and some other goodies and probably have it run up to about […]
Posted in Competition on Jun 19th, 2011
Vance Fried has a new study out at Cato. Here is the executive summary: Undergraduate education is a highly profitable business for nonprofit colleges and universities. They do not show profits on their books, but instead take their profits in the form of spending on some combination of research, graduate education, low-demand majors, low faculty teaching loads, excess […]
Posted in Competition, Government Thuggery on Jun 3rd, 2011
Via Coyote, the whole article has to be supplied. Look at the last sentence too: For a few years, Mike Haege’s sister lived in north Minneapolis. He knows the neighborhood at least a little bit, and when a tornado tore through the area on Sunday, May 22, he took notice. On the news he saw […]
Posted in Competition, Health Care on May 16th, 2011
A little over a hundred years ago a considerable number of the mutual aid societies began to offer medical care to their members. The way they did this was to hire a doctor on salary, and he would then provide basic medical services to all of the members of the order. As David Beito tells […]
Posted in Competition, Economics Problems, Economists, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Mar 16th, 2011
I’ve just finished reading Joe Stiglitz’s account of the financial crisis. In it he makes the following comment: Competition, in this case, had a perverse effect: It caused a race to the bottom — a race to provide ratings that were most favorable to those being rated. Ughh. I guess being a Nobel Prize winner […]
Posted in Competition, Regulation on Dec 14th, 2010
Our three year old son has happily taken an interest in all things choo-choo. Now, I know nothing about either real or model trains – and so his exploration is also a learning experience for me. At several of the train fairs we have attended recently, there have been displays by merchants touting that their […]
Posted in Competition on Nov 3rd, 2010
To the ancients, blindness was an extremely desirable attribute of the deity of justice. Is it not ironic that this “blindness” is now one of the most common objections to competitive market processes? In issues of justice, blindness is desirable because all people are treated equally under the law – even the rich and poor, […]
Posted in Competition, Regulation on Aug 23rd, 2010
With the latest egg scare coming to a head, I am sure that you will be reading plenty of commentary on how we need the FDA to take a greater role in food oversight, and that the powers of the FDA should be expanded. Of course, a crisis is a great opportunity to get people […]
Posted in Competition, Standards of Living on Aug 16th, 2010
Took our family to see the excellent Toy Story 3 the other day and a couple of things came to me. Could it possibly be that movie theaters are responding to the severe and increased competition from mobile entertainment, home theater entertainment, and all of the other types of cool entertainment we have today? I […]
Posted in Competition, Health Care on Jul 19th, 2010
OK, I lied about taking a complete hiatus. Here is a new research paper on how competition between hospitals in England impacts health outcomes (and do note that the starting point here is that there was no/little competition before the reform). The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. […]