10 Dec 2014
by Jim Rose
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economics of education, politics - New Zealand
Tags: do gooders, poverty and inequality, School lunches
School lunches is back in the news again in New Zealand
Utopia, you are standing in it!
When children arrive at school without breakfast, being the dismal economist I am, the question I ask is not why they didn’t have breakfast – I ask whether their parents had breakfast.
If these children are getting a free breakfast because their parents are too poor to buy them breakfast food, why aren’t their parents invited to school to have a free breakfast as well. How do these parents eat at all? Any good parent would give up their breakfast for their children.
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Mary Zaki in their just released Expanding the School Breakfast Program: Impacts on Children’s Consumption, Nutrition and Health look at the school lunch program is nearly universally available in U.S. public schools.
They use experimental data collected by the US Department of Agriculture to measure the impact of two policy innovations aimed at increasing access to the school breakfast program.
The first, universal…
View original post 242 more words
09 Dec 2014
by Jim Rose
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, health economics, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, poverty and inequality, welfare reform
Tags: causes of poverty, economics of personality, poverty and inequality
- alcoholism: Alcohol costs money, interferes with your ability to work, and leads to expensive reckless behavior.
- drug addiction: Like alcohol, but more expensive, and likely to eventually lead to legal troubles you’re too poor to buy your way out of.
- single parenthood: Raising a child takes a lot of effort and a lot of money. One poor person rarely has enough resources to comfortably provide this combination of effort and money.
- unprotected sex: Unprotected sex quickly leads to single parenthood. See above.
- dropping out of high school: High school drop-outs earn much lower wages than graduates. Kids from rich families may be able to afford this sacrifice, but kids from poor families can’t.
- being single: Getting married lets couples avoid a lot of wasteful duplication of household expenses. These savings may not mean much to the rich, but they make a huge difference for the poor.
- non-remunerative crime: Drunk driving and bar fights don’t pay. In fact, they have high expected medical and legal expenses. The rich might be able to afford these costs. The poor can’t.
Yet as Charles Murray keeps reminding us, all of the pathologies on my list are especially prevalent among the poor.
via Poverty and Behavior: Generalizing Yglesias, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.
08 Dec 2014
by Jim Rose
in applied welfare economics, economic growth, economic history, entrepreneurship
Tags: 10-90 lag, international technology diffusion, technology diffusion, technology usage lags
Deigo Comin has been doing excellent work documenting both the length of 10-90 technology lags even for major technologies we now take for granted, and the contribution of these technology usage lags to international differences in living standards and post-war growth rates.
The East Asian Tigers all coincided with a catch-up in the range of technologies used with respect to industrialized countries. These development miracles all involved a substantial reduction of their technology adoption lags relative to (other) OECD countries
15 to 30 years is a common technology usage lag even within the United States for the 10-90 technology lag. The 10-90 lag is how long it takes between when 10% of industry is using a technology, and 90% of an industry is using that technology.
Entrepreneurship, Business Incubation, Business Models & Strategy Blog
There is a plenty of research carried out about how important early adoption of technology is. I’ve recently skimmed a couple of researches on this topic. In my opinion there are two authors that made a better job than others. Their names are Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn.
They performed a cross-country analysis called Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT). This research dataset covers the diffusion of 104 technologies in 161 countries during the last 200 years. The data is available for download.
I just want to share with you the results of their report which could help better understand what’s happening in today’s world of innovations and entrepreneurship and what expect from future.
Finding # 1. “On average, countries adopted a new technology 45 years after its invention.”
Finding # 2. “Variation in adoption rates is larger than you might expect and accounts for 25% of differences…
View original post 95 more words
06 Dec 2014
by Jim Rose
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, liberalism
Sociologists have shied from such cultural work, fearful of critiques similar to those that greeted 1960s culture-of-poverty scholarship by Oscar Lewis, the policy studies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the Parsonian overdetermining emphasis on values.
In focusing on ways that impoverished communities perpetuated poverty, such scholarship was criticized for blaming the victim, and for several decades, sociologists have taken pains to distance themselves not only from that approach but from studies of the cultural dimensions of poverty, particularly black poverty.
The great irony in that overreaction is that throughout that 40-year period of self-imposed censorship within the discipline, the vast majority of blacks, and especially black youth and those working on the front lines of poverty mitigation, have been firmly convinced that culture does matter—a lot.
Black youth in particular have insisted that their habits, attitudes, beliefs, and values are what mainly explain their plight, even after fully taking account of racism and their disadvantaged neighborhood conditions.
via How Sociologists Made Themselves Irrelevant – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
06 Dec 2014
by Jim Rose
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, industrial organisation, survivor principle
Tags: anti-trust law, competition law, creative destruction, The meaning of competition
There is a distinction between controlling the supply of a product and producing or selling most of the supply of a product.
“Dominant” producers who sell a major portion of a product’s supply usually have no control over the supply. They have no power to set any lower level of industry output and a higher price than that which would prevail in a market with many suppliers and no dominant firm.
Usually, a dominant producer is the most efficient firm in the industry. Its large output is the result of its efficiency in supplying the market. The market price is as low as it would be with many producers frequently lower.
Any attempt by a dominant firm to restrict its own supply and increase price after reaching a “dominant” position simply results in the expansion of output by other firms, the entry of additional firms, and loss of its dominance. A dominant firm can keep its dominance only by behaving competitively.
The fact that there is a dominant firm, or small group of firms, in an industry is evidence of competitive behavior not of monopolization.
via The Attack on Concentration: Newsroom: The Independent Institute.
06 Dec 2014
by Jim Rose
in applied welfare economics, development economics, economics of media and culture, growth disasters, growth miracles, population economics, technological progress
Tags: food snobs, growth disasters, growth miracles, The Great Escape, The Great Fact
Previous Older Entries Next Newer Entries
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments