Utopia, you are standing in it!

In a recent article at Reason.com, Christian Britschgi argues that “Government-mandated price hikes do a lot of things. Spurring technological innovation is not one of them”. This is in response to the self-serve kiosks in fast-food restaurants that seem to have appeared everywhere following increases in the minimum wage.

In essence, his argument is that minimum wages do not induce technological innovation. That is an empirical question. I am willing to consider that this is not the most significant of adjustment margins to large changes in the minimum wage. The work of Andrew Seltzer on the minimum wage during the Great Depression in the United States suggests that at the very least it ought not be discarded.  Britschgi does not provide such evidence, he merely cites anecdotal pieces of support. Not that anecdotes are bad, but those that are cited come from the kiosk industry – hardly a neutral…

It’s Casual Friday again (okay, it’s Saturday morning…just blame my ISP), and this week we’re going to take a look back in history at a Cool Job that no longer exists. I first read about this job in a wonderful book by Allison Weir called Henry VIII: The King and His Court, and it has intrigued me ever since.

The Groom of the Stool was a position in the court of Henry VIII bestowed upon a favored confidante and close friend of the King: it came with a title, a tidy sum of yearly compensation, and an “all access VIP pass” to the King’s Privy Chamber where decisions affecting the future of England were made. Due to his proximity to the King’s person (more about that in a moment), the mere word of a Groom of the Stool “was evidence of the King’s will”, according to British historian David…

We have looked at all of the people in line to the succession to the throne of England. The fact that James VI, King of Scots was eventually chosen as successor to Elizabeth I demonstrates two ideas. First and foremost is the fact that male prefered primogeniture had become the tradition if not the law by this time. The second point is that the monarch still had power to name their successor. Although by the late 1590s it had become treasonous to talk about the succession to the queen herself there were those that knew the issue had to be raised eventually.

The queen’s chief minister was Sir Robert Cecil who at one point supported the succession of Lady Arabella Stuart to the throne. He eventually shifted his alliance to the King of Scots and in 1601 began secret correspondences with James promising him the throne of England. The action toward…

Before I move on to what made the advisors of Elizabeth I to choose James VI, I want to discuss another possible claimant to the throne, James’s cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart.

Lady’s Arabella’s claim to the English throne stemmed from her descent via Henry VII of England. Henry VII’s daughter, Margaret Tudor married, as her second marriage,  Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, and this union produced a daughter, Margaret Douglas,  Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, this union produced two son Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley and Charles Stuart, 5th Earl of Lennox. Henry Stuart, lord Darnley married his cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. As you recall Mary, Queen of Scots was a descendent of Henry VII via Margaret Tudor’s first marriage to James IV, King of Scots. Charles Stuart, 5th Earl of Lennox secretly married Elizabeth Cavendish in 1574 and this greatly angered Queen Elizabeth I because it was done…

A new study published in the Public Library of Science Journal suggests more children are vulnerable to contagious diseases resulting from a number of metro areas nationwide that have large amounts of non-medical exemptions for vaccination.

According to USA Today, 15 metropolitan areas in 12 to eighteen states (like Arizona, Minnesota, North Dakota and Utah) where the number of un-vaccinated children is growing. Unfortunately, as the manuscript points out, as the number of non-medical vaccine exemptions increases, so do the number of children not protected against contagious illnesses such as measles, mumps and rubella, small pox, and even chicken pox.

USA Today also points out this is the first in-depth research of states with non-medical exemptions. With an increase of the population of people refusing to vaccine, the likelihood of disease outbreaks, including sicknesses once thought to be eradicated (such as small pox or polio).

The increase in non-vaccinated…

Interesting piece by Prof Per Urlaub.

Football in East Germany was visible till unification. Post-unification, there are hardly any players from East. Why?

My article with Rosolino Candela, The Lightship in Economics, has been accepted today for publication at Public Choice. This is the second of a series of articles that we are working on in order to reconsider the role of the lighthouse in economics (a debate that has been vivid since Ronald Coase’s 1974 article in the Journal of Law & Economics). The abstract is below and the paper can be consulted here:

What role does government play in the provision of public goods? Economists have used the lighthouse as an empirical example to illustrate the extent to which the private provision of public goods is possible. This inquiry, however, has neglected the private provision of lightships. We investigate the private operation of the world’s first modern lightship, established in 1731 on the banks of the Thames estuary going in and out of London. First, we show…

A Guardian op-ed by David Zonsheine, board chairman of B’Tselem, charged Israel with engaging in a “barbaric” act against Bedouin in Khan al-Ahmar, an encampment in the contested E-1 area between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim – within (Israeli controlled) Area C of the West Bank.

The article begins thusly:

Israel is intent on destroying the homes of the 173 Palestinians who live in the small shepherding community of Khan al-Ahmar, along with the school that serves 150 children from the area. Last month, Israel’s high court of justice removed the last obstacle to this barbaric act of demolishing an entire community in order to forcibly transfer its residents and take over their land.

We’ve highlighted the words “their land” because it erroneously suggests that the Palestinians own the land in question. However, as is made clear elsewhere in the article – and, as CAMERA demonstrated in a recent post on…

This is interesting bit of news. Apparently two filmmakers in an award winning film used fake currency notes. But they looked so real that they have been booked:

Cheung Wai-chuen and Law Yun-lam were found guilty on May 31 of possession of counterfeit cash that was used in the film, which took home five awards – including best picture – at the 36th Hong Kong Film Awards.

In a twist worthy of a Hollywood plot, the authenticity that had garnered the film so much acclaim was now the pair’s undoing.

The Eastern Court heard that in 2016, the year the film came out, Law borrowed 9,996 fake HK$1,000 banknotes from Cheung for a prank. Police found the money in Law’s car and later discovered some 200,000 more banknotes at Cheung’s props company.

Since the notes were so close to the real McCoy, Eastern Court Magistrate Cheung Kit-yee said she…

Our hero of the week is Soumya Swaminathan, a woman grandmaster chess champion from India (she’s 29). She was also the former World Girls’ Junior Chess Champion. Now she’s deliberately hurt her career in the cause of women’s rights—and her own rights—by pulling out the Indian National Team that will play at the Asian Nations Cup to be held in Iran from July 26 to August 4. Iran, of course, requires women to wear hijabs in public, something that isn’t just tolerated by many Western feminists and Control Leftists, but positively extolled. They rarely mention the many women who, under compulsion, wear the garment when they don’t want to, which of course is the point of the My Stealthy Freedom and White Wednesdays movements in Iran. I expect Swaminathan mentions the burkha because she’d have to cover her whole body if she went outside.

Here’s Swaminathan’s statement from…

Edward Glaeser of Harvard has a nice post in NYT Economix Blog.

Jevons Paradox says that certain policies which try and prevent a behavior can lead to more of that behavior.