After the discussion in my post yesterday on the Investment Boost subsidy scheme announced in the Budget I thought a bit more about who was likely to benefit the most from it. The general answer of course is the purchasers of the longest-lived assets. Why? Because if you have an asset which IRD estimates to […]
Tweet… is from my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s January 6th, 2011, column, “Settled ‘facts’ that just ain’t so“: U.S. manufacturing is going through the same kind of labor-saving technological innovation as agriculture. In 1790, farmers were 90 percent of the U.S. labor force. By 1900, only about 41 percent of our labor force was…
The IMF puts the hidden cost of trading goods inside the EU at the equivalent of a 45% tariff. For services the figure climbs to 110%, higher than Trump’s “Liberation day” tariffs on Chinese imports—measures many saw as a near-embargo. These barriers are not direct taxes. Instead, a construction company might find its building materials or plans, […]
If you are like me, you spend a certain amount of time trying not to remember the pandemic experience. But COVID-19 pandemic did cause more than one million American deaths. In a world of sane and sensible prioritizing and policy-making, spending some time and effort focused on how to reduce the risks and costs of…
Michael Reddell writes – There were good things in the Budget. There may be few/no votes in better macroeconomic statistics and, specifically, a monthly CPI but – years late (for which the current government can’t really be blamed) – it is finally going to happen.
Regulations about abortion are often wildly controversial. But what effects to they actually have? Caitlin Myers addresses these issues in “From Roe to Dobbs: 50 Years of Cause and Effect of US State Abortion Regulations” (Annual Review of Public Health 2025, pp. 433-446). As a starting point, consider the years before and after the 1973 US Supreme Court…
Econ 101 is often dismissed as too simplistic. Yet recent events suggest that Econ 101 is underrated. Take the tariff debate: understanding that a tariff is a tax, that prices represent opportunity costs, that a bilateral trade deficit is largely meaningless, that a so-called trade “deficit” is equally a goods surplus or an investment surplus—these […]
There’s an enormous amount of data showing that people in the United States enjoy much higher livings standards than Europeans. That’s not too surprising since most European governments have adopted large-sized welfare states while Americans are (comparatively!) lucky in that we have a medium-sized welfare state. That’s all very straightforward and uncontroversial. What’s not completely […]
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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