There are a series of papers evaluating impact of microcredit in 6 countries.
Justin Sandefur of CGDEV sums them further:
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The BBC Flew a Drone Over Auschwitz
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Auschwitz, World War II
Whatever Happened To The Anti-War Movement? : NPR
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in liberalism, Public Choice Tags: anti-war movements
the anti-war movement in America evaporated because Democrats — inspired to protest by their anti-Republican feelings — stopped protesting once the Democratic Party achieved success in Congress in 2006 and then in the White House in 2008.
“As president, Obama has maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan,” Heaney, an assistant professor of organizational studies and political science, said in a news release. “The anti-war movement should have been furious at Obama’s ‘betrayal’ and reinvigorated its protest activity.”
Instead, Heaney continued, “attendance at anti-war rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement have dissipated. The election of Obama appeared to be a demobilizing force on the anti-war movement, even in the face of his pro-war decisions.”
After 2008, the proportion of protesters who identified themselves as Democrats dropped from about 50% to roughly 20%. The rest identified with no party or, less often, a third party. The proportion of third-party activists grew over time.
Is surge pricing by Uber another name for overtime and weekend pay
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economics of media and culture, economics of regulation, Public Choice, rentseeking, transport economics Tags: barriers to entry, compensating differentials, peakload pricing, taxi regulation, Uber
Uber is in strife of late for charging more at peak times - Uber calls it surge pricing. We don’t object paying more for a meal at a restaurant at dinner time rather than at lunchtime but the same people object to paying more for the taxi late at night where the driver must risk the dangers of solitary night-time work and picking up strangers who might have had a few too many.
Under Uber’s now-national policy, price surging is capped during disasters and states of emergency at the fourth-highest nonemergency surge seen in the previous two months.
We all expect to pay more for air tickets at peak times, such as school holidays and Christmas. Indeed, one reason we are able to delay booking is we know seats will be available because they are selling at a premium for those who booked late. Others who make their plans early quite enjoy getting the cheaper for early bird bookings.
Is surge pricing another name for over time and night and weekend pay? Union contracts provide for overtime pay, if you work more than the specified 8 hours a day.
The Holidays Act in New Zealand provides that if an employee works at the weekends, they are paid at 150% of the normal rate; and double party on public holidays. Not many employees object of this wage premium for work in it inconvenient times. Cafes and restaurants routinely charge of 10-15% price premium on public holidays to cover this overtime pay.
As would be expected under the theory of compensating differentials, there are wage premiums for jobs where the worker must work at inconvenient or unsocial times, in jobs with a greater risk of injury, or otherwise work more unpleasant than the average.
Viscusi estimated the wage premium for hazardous jobs to be rather large in the United States:
The extra pay for job hazards, in effect, establishes the price employers must pay for an unsafe workplace.
Wage premiums paid to U.S. workers for risking injury are huge; they amount to about $245 billion annually (in 2004 dollars), more than 2 percent of the gross domestic product and 5 percent of total wages paid. These wage premiums give firms an incentive to invest in job safety because an employer who makes the workplace safer can reduce the wages he pays.
Those who don’t like Uber’s surge pricing can always hail a cab. As I remember from American TV programmes, at peak times, prospective customers on the side of the road hail cabs at peak times with several fingers raised to indicate how much more than the standard fare, they are willing to pay.
There is nothing new under the sun. Uber’s app allows you to do the price bidding for a taxi on your cellphone rather than out in the cold
Mail can be creased, crumpled, and crammed
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in TV shows Tags: Newman, Seinfeld
I, Smartphone
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economics of media and culture, industrial organisation, survivor principle Tags: IPencil, Iphone
Based on Leonard Read’s famous essay “I, Pencil,” this short video beautifully illustrates the vast complexity that we carry in our pockets.
No one person could ever make a smartphone. It required the spontaneous cooperation of millions across all countries. The world could never be reinvented by a single mind, but rather requires the coordination of plans made possible only through private property and the price system.
HT: http://tucker.liberty.me/2015/01/27/15-great-lessons-on-commerce-and-entrepreneurship/#.VMfl-ZUvGGA.facebook
If Revisionist UI Models Are Wrong, So Are Revisionist Minimum Wage Models
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics
The Hagedorn, Manovskii, and Mitman working paper on the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on employment has been getting a lot of press lately. In brief, they find that the end of the federal unemployment insurance extension accounts for about 1.8 million new jobs in 2014.
Mike Konczal does a useful deep dive on the paper here and is very skeptical of the result. In particular, he criticizes as implausible and empirically inaccurate labor market search models that imply employer monopsony power, which are essential to the plausibility of the result. These models are also essential to the revisionist literature on the minimum wage, holding that minimum wage increases do not reduce low-productivity workers’ employment. Curiously, Mike Konczal has defended search models in this aspect. He’s a smart guy and clearly thinks that applications of search theory to macroeconomic variables have problems that the application to the minimum wage doesn’t…
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Did Duke University blacklist Milton Friedman?
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics
Great ideas are earned through hardship. It is a conviction that requires no argument, inscribed into our collective consciousness. As I have been writing/researching about Milton Friedman’s popular writings, I was surprised by the (popular) claim that Friedman was for many years an outcast in the economics profession, the proof was that such a respectable place as Duke University refused to carry his books (the specific source was a celebration of Friedman’s life by Robert Samuelson in Newsweek).
Milton and Rose Friedman write in their autobiography Two Lucky People, page 341 in the 1999 edition, of a letter sent to them by Mark Rollinson in 1989, who 30 years earlier had been a student at Duke University,
My years at Duke … were not happy ones. … To make matters worse, most of my fellow students and all of my professors held my views on several subjects in…
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Postwar vs. New Gilded Age: How did the middle class do?
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economic growth, income redistribution, politics - USA, poverty and inequality Tags: middle class stagnation
The iron law of volunteering: the nicer the cause, the nastier the people
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, liberalism, occupational choice Tags: activists, do gooders, expressive voting, Greens
Average life expectancy for girls born in 2057 will be 100?!
28 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in population economics Tags: life expectancy, The Great Escape
HT: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2912391/Now-s-gran-old-age-Average-life-expectancy-girls-born-2057-ONE-HUNDRED.html
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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