Prior to the outbreak of the second world war, Coca-Cola’s only unqualified success on the international scene was its bottling operations in Nazi Germany. Sales records were being set year after year in that venue, and by 1939 Coca-Cola had 43 bottling plants and more than 600 local distributors in that country. Fanta originated as a result of difficulties importing Coca-Cola syrup into Nazi […]
We provide the first direct estimates of the effects of minimum wages on low-wage workers in families at different points of the distribution of income-to-needs, using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which oversamples low-income families. We find adverse – rather than beneficial – effects of minimum wages on the employment, hours,…
See Revenue over reason: A case for home distilling by Ben Semark of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. After an excerpt from Semark’s article, I discuss how this relates to voting by congressmen on bills during the Federalist period, the subject of my Ph. D. dissertation.Excerpt from Semark:”Creating home-brewed spirits was not a niche or commercial practice…
The world’s most under-appreciated problem is demographic decline mixed with tax-and-transfer entitlement programs. Those two factors, when combined, are a massive problem. All of which is explained in my series on demographic change and fiscal crisis (see here, here, here, here, and here). Today, let’s focus on the problem in Europe, building on what I […]
See Gender Disparities in College Enrollment and Marriage Patterns by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman & Joseph Winkelmann.”Over the past half-century, the gender composition of American college campuses has shifted from predominantly male to predominantly female. Today, 1.6 million more women than men attend four-year colleges in the US. Over the same time period, the economic status…
In his “New rule” comedy-and-news/opinion segment of Real Time, Bill Maher argues that there’s been too much disapproveal of romances in the workplace. (He mentions the draconian rule proposed by AOC, which demonizes romances between people in Congress and any staffer, no matter who they work for, even though Congresspeople are already prohibited from dating…
Pleased to see at least one journalist asking tough questions of TOP. It is alarming that the party leader doers;t even know her own party’s rules, especially one as important as the board being able to over-rule the caucus. I guess this is what you get when a party leader is not a long-standing member,…
I’ve written many columns documenting Cuba’s economic misery. Probably the most-persuasive evidence that socialism has failed in that country is the chart showing how Cuba has fallen behind other (very similar) countries ever since Fidel Castro took over more than six decades ago. Though I’ve always thought the most-damning visual came from the Economist, which […]
An excellent piece today by Jesse Singal in The Dispatch; the whole thing is worth reading, but here are some… The post “The Cascade of Dysfunction That Helped Doom Jason Arday” appeared first on Reason.com.
Total fertility rates in East Asia have fallen to levels without historical precedent, even though the region’s Confucian heritage long placed extraordinary emphasis on family continuity and large families. We argue that this “Confucian Fertility Paradox” dissolves once we separate two strands of the tradition and recognize that modernization affected them very differently. The pro-natal…
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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