India Awakes – Street Vendors vs. Corrupt Officials
07 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in development economics, economics, growth disasters, growth miracles Tags: India
Australian territory passes anti-blasphemy law
07 Aug 2016 1 Comment
in economics
You may not know that in many parts of Australia, blasphemy—the criticism of religion—remains a criminal offense, though it’s almost never enforced. Wikipedia describes the complicated situation:
All common law offences were abolished and replaced by a criminal code without replacing the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel with criminal code offences in Queensland in 1899, Western Australia in 1919, and the Commonwealth in 1995. Tasmania abolished common law in 1924 but introduced blasphemy offences with the Tasmanian Criminal Code Act 1924. In 1996, the Australian Capital Territory abolished the common law offence of blasphemous libel but not blasphemy.
Although the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were abolished in England and Wales in 2008, they have not been abolished in Australia in South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, and Norfolk Island, and blasphemy but not blasphemous libel remains as an offence…
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Economically Speaking: Government Regulation – George Stigler
07 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economics, economics of religion, George Stigler
@BERNIESANDERS SOLD OUT #feeltheburn
07 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in economics, libertarianism, politics - USA Tags: 2016 presidential election
World Cup pay gap: Here’s why it’s justified
06 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, discrimination, gender, labour economics, sports economics Tags: gender wage gap, superstar wages
Privatization is not for the faint of heart
06 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in economics
Pakistan suffers frequent power outages that have a huge negative cost on businesses and general quality of life (story here: “Pakistan utility company fights to power chaotic port megacity“). Here is why privatization seems like an obvious choice:
1. “Power cuts lasting 12 hours a day or more have devastated Pakistan’s economy. The loss of millions of jobs has fuelled unrest in a nuclear-armed nation already beset by a Taliban insurgency.”
2. “At the state-run Peshawar Electricity Supply Company, the majority of staff are illiterate, most new hires are relatives of existing staff and 37 percent of power generated was stolen.”
In 2008, the government decided to privatize the Karachi Electric Supply Company. The new owners fired about 1/3 of the workers, cut off customers who didn’t pay their electric bills, and cracked down on people illegally tapping into the electric system.
The response was quite telling. First…
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Transition in Eastern Europe – Gary Becker and Ronald Coase
06 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, defence economics, economics, Gary Becker, Ronald Coase Tags: transitional economies
McCloskey explains Modern Economic Growth
06 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, economic history, economics, growth disasters, growth miracles Tags: Deirdre McCloskey, The Great Enrichment, The Great Escape, The Great Fact
Was it Wrong to Drop the Atom Bomb on Japan?
06 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in defence economics, laws of war, war and peace Tags: bombing of Hiroshima, World War II
Australian @greens are more extreme than @OneNationAus?
06 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in Public Choice Tags: 2016 Australian federal election, Australian Greens, left-wing populists, median voter theorem, right-wing populists
42% of party A voters second preferences the Australian Labour Party. Less than 20% of party B voters second preference the Liberal Party of Australia.
Party A is Pauline Hanson’s One Nation voters; party B are Australian Green voters. Which are more extreme in terms of the distance from the median voter?
Which is more likely be persuaded to change their vote by been told over and over in the media that there are a bunch of extremists with concerns completely unrelated to the average Australian. We should note that people vote to anger and displease under the theory of expressive voting. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is UKIP without the polish.
A Two Party System
06 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in economics
I have seen some rumblings in op-eds that we should try to organize “the center” and come up with some kind of third party for the middle. The Republicans and Democrats are too partisan and are not representing the interests of the center. Or something like that.
These people do not seem to have taken a class on elections when they were in college, because if they had they would understand that any efforts at creating third party would probably hurt their true interests.
This is because we have a largest-vote-getter, winner-take-all system. It pressures people to divide into two camps. Think of a political spectrum as a line.
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In Defense of Open Dialogue
05 Aug 2016 Leave a comment
in economics
Originally published on the Genetic Literacy Project on 4 August 2016
See Stephan Neidenbach’s reflection on how the site was closed
On August 2, the Facebook page for We Love GMOs and Vaccines suffered yet another activist swarm attack where anti-vaxxers and campaigners against GM technology coordinated a large number of complaints in order get Facebook to shut the page down. The best way, it seems, for someone to stop dialogue and avoid facts is to silence the critics. Facebook was duped by a band of cunning zealots and needs to fix this trick that can be exploited to take any site down.
While operatives like Joseph Mercola or Gary Ruskin may feel their standing, book sales and sponsorship agreements are threatened by people who disagree with them and their narrow-minded worldviews, I feel that willingly shutting down contrarian sites and social media pages is far from democratic. Do we really want to live in a…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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