Photo: Micaela Bedell for Strategies for Children

Just as the New England Patriots have an award-winning hero in quarterback Tom Brady, early education has a Nobel Prize-winning champion in University of Chicago economist James Heckman.

Heckman’s public policy position is simple and powerful: To make society stronger, invest in early childhood development. Drawing on more than a decade of his own research, Heckman argues that high-quality preschool prepares children to succeed and makes them less likely to enroll in special education classes, become pregnant as teenagers or land in jail.

In addition to a clear message, Heckman is an effective messenger. He’s quoted in newspaper stories, and he has a pervasive social media presence, making his case on his website, as well as on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

“What I learned that became so important,” he explains in one his videos, “was that investing in people…

In June of 1988 in Sweden it was announced that survivorship benefits, a sort of government provided life insurance paid to a wife whose husband dies, would be discontinued. There was one interesting exception:  an unmarried couple with a child together born before the change could take up survivorship insurance if they married before Jan 1 1990.  The spike in new marriages in the graph shows the response to this incentive.

That’s the basis for Petra Persson‘s job market paper. Petra points out that the spike is somewhat mysterious because for all of these couples the promise of survivorship insurance wasn’t enough to induce them to marry previously and only when the option was going to disappear did they exercise it.

Of course some of these new marriages were couples that planned eventually to marry (and take up benefits) and who moved their marriage date earlier. But Petra credibly…

Writing about the Tangled Web, Atanu Dey (his new series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and more to come) points to the work of Thomas Schelling.

Thomas Schelling is the 2005 Nobel Prize winning Economist for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.”

Atanu points to a quote in an article by Tim Harford: “. . . his work treats human frailties as something to be analysed and worked with, rather than denounced or denied.”

Atanu concludes, “That lies at the crux of a multitude of failures. People don’t fully appreciate the fact that what we have is frail human nature and if we refuse to confront reality, we are likely to make public policies that are wrong-headed and disastrous because they are built upon fairy-tale visions of human nature.”

Discussing and reading about the environmental issues I have come…

Very wise piece on the complexities of negotiating with Iran by Philip Stephens in today’s UK Financial Times.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/af170df6-4d1c-11e3-bf32-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2kiP31htK

©Ingram Pinn

The who-said-what game  about last weekend’s talks in Geneva has become a distraction. The six-power negotiations  with Tehran to curb Iran’s nuclear programme may yet succeed or fail. But  wrangling between the US and France on the terms of an acceptable deal should  not allow the trees to obscure the forest. The organising facts shaping the  negotiations have not changed.

The first of these is that Tehran’s acquisition of a bomb would be more than  dangerous for the Middle East and for wider international security. It would  most likely set off a nuclear arms race that would see Saudi Arabia, Turkey and  Egypt signing up to the nuclear club. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty would  be shattered. A future regional conflict could draw Israel into launching a  pre-emptive nuclear strike…

I’ve been re-reading some Thomas Schelling, and reminded of how much insight there is on nearly every paragraph of every page (as has been said: “whole careers in international relations have been built out of codifying a few sentences in Schelling”).

Some excerpts, below.

First, The Strategy of Conflict (1960):

On the (then) paucity of strategic studies:

“[M]ilitary services, in contrast to almost any other sizable and respectable profession, have no identifiable academic counterpart … Within the universities, military strategy in this country has been the preoccupation of a small number of historians and political scientists, supported on a scale that suggests that deterring the Russians from a conquest of Europe is about as important as enforcing the antitrust laws”. (p8)

On trying to persuade someone you’ll carry out an irrational threat:

“And one can suspend or destroy his own “rationality”, at least to a limited extent; one can…

by Jerry O’Driscoll

Not my words, but those of Armen Alchian, as reported by William Allen in Econ Journal Watch.  Allen has written his memoirs and a history of UCLAs economics department in “A Life Among the Econ, Particularly at UCLA.” To a great extent, it is the story of Alchian and the core group around him in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  Allen was co-author with Alchian of University Economics, an influential undergraduate textbook that inspired Paul Heyne’s Economic Way of Thinking.

My own way of thinking was influenced as much by the UCLA tradition as by Mises and Hayek. Mises and Hayek had an important influence on that tradition, however. An emphasis on decision making under uncertainty and incomplete information was its hallmark. All social phenomena could be analyzed by economics, and the economic analysis was micro.

Alchian didn’t deny there were aggregate economic phenomena, only…

by Mario Rizzo

Many years ago (around 1982, I think) Jerry O’Driscoll and I wrote a paper that was the basis of an American Economic Association session. The paper was called “What is Austrian Economics?” The paper gradually evolved into our book, The Economics of Time and Ignorance.

The purpose of this book was to present Austrian economics in an updated fashion. To do this we needed to do two things: (1) uncover many of the fundamental ideas implicit in the tradition but not, as of then, sufficiently elaborated or made explicit; and (2) confront Austrian ideas with recent developments in economics, both mainstream and outside of the mainstream.

We faced many initial negative criticisms of the book. I will say that I was very disappointed by some of the old-guard reaction to the book. But do not confuse “old guard” with age because some of the greatest encouragement…

Karl Popper (1902-94) and Thomas Kuhn (1922-96)

by Chidem Kurdas

I just read The Politics of Bureaucracy by Gordon Tullock, one of the best books written on the behavior of bureaucrats. Although originally published in 1965, it remains very much relevant today, especially as the debt deal currently in Congress could bring spending caps on programs administered by numerous bureaucracies. These entities implement policy changes, yet efforts to rein in government spending or impose new regulation typically pay little or no attention to their behavior.

Professor Tullock derives his insights from the basic observation that when embedded in an administrative hierarchy that is supposed to serve some – typically vague – public interest, people remain individuals; they still have their own preferences and interests. This is nicely expressed in the foreword by James Buchanan, who paraphrases Adam Smith’s well-known dictum about the butcher, the brewer or the baker. I will further paraphrase his take on Smith: “It…