Utopia, you are standing in it!

When, a week or so ago, I wrote about how our political (and bureaucratic) leaders appeared to have given up hope, and to have lost any serious interest in turning around New Zealand’s dismal long-term productivity performance (and even worse short-term performance), and linked to my recent speech on such themes, a few commenters asked what policies I would implement, given the option.  One was specific enough to invite a “top 10 policies” list.

In what follows, I’m not suggesting that all these proposals are equally important.  It is also worth recogising that some are designed to directly improve economic performance, at least one is primarily about compensating some potential losers who might otherwise be a roadblock in the way of overdue reform, and some at improving confidence in our political system and associated institutions.   Part of what needs to accompany any significant reform package is a strong accepted…

Jesús Huerta de Soto discusses the differences in two schools:

Neoclassical economists believe that capital supply and demand jointly determine the interest rate in equilibrium, that subjective considerations of time preference determine supply, but that entrepreneurs determine demand based on the marginal productivity of capital (that is, based on predominantly objective considerations). This approach parallels the one that Marshall developed to explain price determination in the market, and that Böhm-Bawerk and the Austrian school reject and emphasize that when entrepreneurs demand funds, they act as mere intermediaries for workers and owners of factors of production, who are the final demanders of present goods in the form of wages and rents, and in exchange they transfer to entrepreneurs the ownership of future goods of greater value (which will only become available when the process of production concludes).

Consequently, from the perspective of Austrian economists, both sides – the supply of…

This week, I appeared on the CNN special addressing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in Indiana. While I have been a long-standing supporter of same-sex marriage, I raised concerns over the dismissive treatment of religious concerns over the scope of anti-discrimination laws and how they may curtail free exercise of religion. I have previously written both columns and academic work on this collision between the two areas of law. In the program, I raised an example of the growing conflicts that we discussed earlier on this blog of a bakery that refused to make a cake deemed insulting to homosexuals while other bakers are objecting to symbols that they view as insulting to their religious views. This issue also came up with an advocate for LGBT rights on the show:

I received my Ph.D. from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, and I have very fond memories of that experience, including interactions with great economists such as James Buchanan and Walter Williams.

But not everyone has favorable views of GMU’s market-friendly program. There’s a group, UnKoch My Campus, that pretends to be horrified that the school has attracted contributions from philanthropists such as Charles Koch and David Koch.

In a column for the Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein opines about the ostensible controversy.

Thanks to a group of courageous and persistent students, George Mason University was recently forced to acknowledge that it had accepted millions of dollars from billionaire Charles Koch and other conservatives under arrangements that gave the donors input into several appointments at the university’s famously libertarian economics department. These arrangements violated traditional norms meant to insulate academic institutions from donor influence… The story fits neatly into the…

From Wikipedia

The Great War is a 26-episode documentary series from 1964 on the First World War. The documentary was a co-production of the Imperial War Museum, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The narrator was Michael Redgrave, with readings by Marius Goring, Ralph Richardson, Cyril Luckham, Sebastian Shaw and Emlyn Williams. Each episode is c.40 minutes long.

In August 1963, at the suggestion of Alasdair Milne, producer of the BBC’s current affairs programme Tonight, the BBC resolved to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War with a big television project. The series was the first to feature veterans, many of them still relatively fit men in their late sixties or early seventies, speaking of their experiences after a public appeal for veterans was published in…

A filmed report by the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen which was aired on BBC One’s ‘News at Ten’ and on the BBC News Channel on May 16^th was also posted on the BBC News website under the headline “Gaza: The bullets stop, the burials go on“.

“More funerals have taken place for the Palestinians killed by Israeli troops in Gaza on Monday.

An emergency session of the UN Security Council has heard condemnation of both Israel and the militant group, Hamas.

Today marks the 70th anniversary of what Palestinians call the Catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of people fled – or were expelled from their homes – when the state of Israel was established.

Our Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen sent this report from Gaza.”

Bowen – who appears to have actually filmed the report on May 15^th – began by giving a context-free…

Bryan Caplan’s next big project is entitled Poverty: Who to Blame, a cornerstone topic of which will be “moral blameworthiness“.  Caplan discusses the concept in short in a recent exchange with Robin Hanson:

Unlike Robin, I should add, I’m a big believer in moral blameworthiness.  Whether we’re discussing poverty or involuntary celibacy, I think we should always start by investigating whether the sufferer is culpable for his own woes.  And empirically, I think the sufferer usually is highly culpable…At the same time, though, I freely admit that a sizable minority of people suffer blamelessly. A severe congenital handicap could easily lead to both severe poverty and isolation despite exemplary behavior. Should government do anything about this? I don’t know…

This analysis, and the forthcoming book, relies on deontological moral philosophy that is pretty alien to economic analysis, which almost presoposes consequentialism.  While Caplan would reply that even the most…

From Wikipedia

The Great War is a 26-episode documentary series from 1964 on the First World War. The documentary was a co-production of the Imperial War Museum, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The narrator was Michael Redgrave, with readings by Marius Goring, Ralph Richardson, Cyril Luckham, Sebastian Shaw and Emlyn Williams. Each episode is c.40 minutes long.

In August 1963, at the suggestion of Alasdair Milne, producer of the BBC’s current affairs programme Tonight, the BBC resolved to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War with a big television project. The series was the first to feature veterans, many of them still relatively fit men in their late sixties or early seventies, speaking of their experiences after a public appeal for veterans was published in…