The National Living Wage: Jeopardising 60,000 Jobs
25 Jun 2017 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, labour economics, minimum wage Tags: British economy, British politics, living wage
Economic Development in 20 minutes to middle schoolers
25 Jun 2017 Leave a comment
in economics
Earlier this week I had 20 minutes each to speak to four classes of middle schoolers about my career. I talked about economic development. I used a presentation (available in full here). Given that it was the antepenultimate day of school, the students and teachers appeared very engaged.
- I showed the students four families from Gapminder’s Dollar Street initiative — one from India, one from Burundi, one from Ukraine, and one from Colombia, and I had students vote (by raised hands) on which family they expected was poorest and which was wealthiest.
2. Then I introduced the four families in turn, and I expressed their monthly income in terms of the price of school lunches at the middle school where I was speaking. (The Ukrainian family’s monthly income was the equivalent of 3,100+ school lunches, more than the most insatiable student should ever consume.)
3. Having highlighted the massive…
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Democratic Female Senators And Identity Politics
25 Jun 2017 Leave a comment
in economics
The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held a hearing last week on political Islam, also referred to as ‘Islamism.’ The committee invited four witnesses: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Asra Q. Nomani, Michael E. Leiter, former director of the U.S National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and John Lenczowski, president of the Institute of World Politics. The hearing called our attention to the dysfunction that we face in addressing the topic.
The two female witnesses were on edge. Earlier that day, a shooter had attacked the Republican baseball team in Alexandria, and only moments before the hearing began a man wearing a Muslim prayer cap had stood up and heckled them, putting Capitol police on high alert. They were expecting tough questions. Both women had been born into deeply conservative Muslim families. Both have been threatened with death by jihadists for things they have said and done. Ayann, who survived genital…
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Bill Maher interviews Maajid Nawaz
25 Jun 2017 Leave a comment
in economics
In this 17-minute video, Bill Maher, who’s in bad odor with Lefists for using the n-word, interviews someone who’s even more demonized: Maajid Nawaz. Nawaz is a man I much admire, as he began his adult life as an extreme Islamist but now runs the think tank Quilliam, devoted to tamping down extremism—especially among Muslims. Because he’s a moderate Muslim in a suit instead of a bearded imam clutching a Qur’an, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) named him, along with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as one of several “anti-Muslim extremists”. That decision was ludicrous, and the SPLC really should have reversed it.
Here Nawaz announces that he’s taking the SPLC to court for defamation. I doubt whether that’ll succeed: I don’t really know libel law except that the statement made has to be “knowingly false” and must damage someone’s reputation (for damages, it has to reduce your worth or…
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Alan McGilvray: The Game Is Not The Same (Part 1)
25 Jun 2017 Leave a comment
in sports economics Tags: cricket
The evolution of American protest music
25 Jun 2017 Leave a comment
in Music, politics - USA Tags: political protest
Truth About Conspiracy Theories
25 Jun 2017 Leave a comment
in economics, economics of media and culture Tags: conspiracy theories
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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