Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in incentives, Politics on Sep 10th, 2010
Actually, we don’t get to see it! They just pick up the factory and machine and take it to a private coffee shop. On the agenda over espressos and lattes, according to more than a dozen lobbyists and political operatives who have taken part in the sessions, have been front-burner issues like Wall Street regulation, […]
Posted in incentives on Aug 9th, 2010
I am in the midst of an excellent book, The Big Necessity, and the author does her best not to be too overtly in love with the state, but she does believe that creating more public toilets would solve all sorts of problems, such as long bathroom lines for women: There would be fewer queues […]
Posted in incentives, Institutions on Jul 29th, 2010
This just hit the wire: WASHINGTON (AP) — Estimates of the number of graves that might be affected by mix-ups at Arlington National Cemetery grew from hundreds to as many as 6,600 on Thursday, as the cemetery’s former superintendent blamed his staff and a lack of resources for the scandal that forced his ouster. John […]
Posted in Education, incentives on Apr 9th, 2010
Inside Higher Ed reports that, Since the 1960s, the national mean G.P.A. at the institutions from which he’s collected grades has risen by about 0.1 each decade – other than in the 1970s, when G.P.A.s stagnated or fell slightly. In the 1950s, according to Rojstaczer’s data, the mean G.P.A. at U.S. colleges and universities was […]
Posted in incentives, Money on Mar 10th, 2010
Did you know that the U.S. government created an agency colloquially known as “Farmer Mac?” Yep, in 1988 Congress chartered a company to do in agriculture exactly what Fannie and Freddie have done in the mortgage market. Farmer Mac, a “private” company, is “allowed” to purchase loans from agricultural lenders and then repackage them into […]
Posted in incentives on Feb 4th, 2010
Yesterday, we explored why it might not make sense to be too tough on crimes – the reason being is that raising the penalty on petty crimes at the same time effectively lowers the penalty on more violent crimes. This seems to be an unattractive and inescapable constraint in law enforcement. At some point, the […]
Posted in incentives on Feb 3rd, 2010
The economic way of thinking demonstrates that it is marginal ðecisions that matter. Thus, students that learn about the economic way of thinking understand that it might not be a good idea to institute the death penalty for crimes like littering and petty theft, even if society really hates having litter and petty theft. Why […]
Posted in incentives on Jan 22nd, 2010
The Grameen Bank has (rightly I think) been recognized for promoting bottom-up development in poor countries. One thing they do is make small microloans available to entrepreneurs without collateral (thus, traditional lenders would typically not lend to them, either due to lack of collateral, or the risk of their business and the cost of administering […]
Posted in incentives on Nov 20th, 2009
I have my students write papers on the intersection of markets and some sticky ethical questions. Should parents be permitted to sell their babies? If you allow a market in kidneys, would it be permissible for a purchaser to use it as wall decoration or a lawn ornament? And so on. Let’s be agnostic about […]
Posted in incentives on Nov 6th, 2009
An example of what the “too big to fail doctrine” gets you: Mr. O’Neal, the man considered most responsible for Merrill’s disastrous foray into risk-taking, told me in an interview last year that in the fall of 2007, when he saw that the firm’s problems were insurmountable, he had a deal to sell Merrill to […]