@NaomiAKlein agrees with #MiltonFriedman on Mancur Olson’s theory of how nations escape institutional sclerosis

Source: quoted by Naomi Klein in “The Shock Doctrine”.

1. There will be no countries that attain symmetrical organization of all groups with a common interest and thereby attain optimal outcomes through comprehensive bargaining.

2. Stable societies with unchanged boundaries tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time.

3. Members of “small” groups have disproportionate organizational power for collective action, and this disproportion diminishes but does not disappear over time in stable societies.

4. On balance, special-interest organizations and collusions reduce efficiency and aggregate income in the societies in which they operate and make political life more divisive.

5. Encompassing organizations have some incentive to make the society in which they operate more prosperous, and an incentive to redistribute income to their members with as little excess burden as possible, and to cease such redistribution unless the amount redistributed is substantial in relation to the social cost of the redistribution.

6. Distributional coalitions make decisions more slowly than the individuals and firms of which they are comprised, tend to have crowded agendas and bargaining tables, and more often fix prices than quantities.

7. Distributional coalitions slow down a society’s capacity to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources in response to changing conditions, and thereby to reduce the rate of economic growth.

8. Distributional coalitions, once big enough to succeed, are exclusive, and seek to limit the diversity of incomes and values of their membership.

9. The accumulation of distributional coalitions increases the complexity of regulation, the role of government, and the complexity of understandings, and changes the direction of social evolution.

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Source: Obituary: Professor Mancur Olson | Obituaries | News | The Independent

Angus Deaton on slow growth as a force for distributional conflict

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Source: ‘Economic growth is the engine of the escape from poverty and material deprivation’ – economist and 2015 Nobel laureate Angus Deaton – AEI | Economics Blog » AEIdeas

@CarlyFiorina says it all on action to fight global warming @jamespeshaw @AndrewLittleMP @garethmorgannz

@EricCrampton @KhyaatiA should New Zealand divide into Cantons?

Suggestions by the New Zealand Initiative for regions to be able to ask to be exempt from some national policies was against a background that New Zealand is too small to be a federal state. The New Zealand provinces were abolished in 1876. Switzerland seems to still put bread in the shops despite having many tiny Cantons and half-Cantons.

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Source: Swiss Statistics – Cantons, communes.

So many American states have smaller populations are New Zealand, half in all, that is difficult to present them on a chart. All managed to be richer the New Zealand despite the horrors of federalism or because of it. These small state populations are before considering how much  local government legislative power there is, including taxing and spending powers, city income taxes and city sales taxes, and county and local police forces.

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Source: List of U.S. states and territories by population – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The median national population size of countries is not much more than New Zealand’s current population.

  • Controlling for location, Easterly and Kraay (2002) found that smaller states were richer than other states in per capita real GDP.
  • Rose (2006) reviewed the impact of size on the level of income, inflation, material well-being, health, education, and the quality of a country’s institutions and found that small countries are more open to trade than large countries, but are not systematically different otherwise.

As I argued in my previous post on distance, New Zealand were prosperous from the time of European settlement despite a small population and their great distance from the main markets of the world on each side of the Atlantic.

Of the ten richest countries in terms of GDP per capita, only four have populations above one million people (Alesina 2003). These countries are the USA (290 million people), Switzerland (7 million people), Norway (4 million people) and Singapore (3 million people). Of these four nations, two are below the global national population median of six million (Alesina 2003).

Mises on prosperity and inequality

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Candidate Lessig’s Bad Example

George Stigler on the influence of economists on public policy

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@jamespeshaw nails the #TPPA policy trade-off @NZGreens

About 1% more GDP but higher drug prices.

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Source: No increased medicine costs under TPPA | Stuff.co.nz

The next best arguments James Shaw made were xenophobia about foreign investment in land and some vast conspiracy theory regarding endangered dolphins.

When your next best argument is foreigners are coming to buy up all our land, you are playing from a weak populist hand. About half of million New Zealand born live in other countries.

About 80% of these live in Australia, the great majority as residents rather than as citizens. These New Zealanders living in Australia and elsewhere need protection under international agreements to ensure they are not the victim of populist outbreaks against the sale of land to foreigners.

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Source: Statistics New Zealand.

In addition, if a foreigner wants to pay over the odds for my house I am glad to separate a fool from his money.

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Source: Statistics New Zealand.

New Zealand has a strong interest in protecting the rights of its own expatriates as well as New Zealand foreign investors to buy land in other countries. As David Friedman explains:

Much more commonly, [economic imperialism] is used by Marxists to describe–and attack–foreign investment in “developing” (i.e., poor) nations. The implication of the term is that such investment is only a subtler equivalent of military imperialism–a way by which capitalists in rich and powerful countries control and exploit the inhabitants of poor and weak countries.

There is one interesting feature of such “economic imperialism” that seems to have escaped the notice of most of those who use the term. Developing countries are generally labour rich and capital poor; developed countries are, relatively, capital rich and labour poor. One result is that in developing countries, the return on labour is low and the return on capital is high–wages are low and profits high. That is why they are attractive to foreign investors.

To the extent that foreign investment occurs, it raises the amount of capital in the country, driving wages up and profits down. The effect is exactly analogous to the effect of free migration. If people move from labour-rich countries to labour-poor ones, they drive wages down and rents and profits up in the countries they go to, while having the opposite effect in the countries they come from.

If capital moves from capital-rich countries to capital-poor ones, it drives profits down and wages up in the countries it goes to and has the opposite effect in the countries it comes from. The people who attack “economic imperialism” generally regard themselves as champions of the poor and oppressed.

To the extent that they succeed in preventing foreign investment in poor countries, they are benefiting the capitalists of those countries by holding up profits and injuring the workers by holding down wages. It would be interesting to know how much of the clamour against foreign investment in such countries is due to Marxist ideologues who do not understand this and how much is financed by local capitalists who do.

Social Justice and Its Critics

 

Denis Healey (1959) on the moral righteousness of @jeremycorbyn

Economic liberty and human flourishing: A discussion with Deirdre McCloskey, Susan Shell, and Yuval Levin

The politics of marijuana in the USA

In representative democracy that is a unitary state such as New Zealand, the issue on marijuana decriminalisation is who will change their vote to vote against a party who advocates marijuana decriminalisation under a MMP system where all elections are close.

In a strong federal state, where some states allow citizen initiated referendums to change the law, it is possible to pioneer reform without that backlash. Then laboratory federalism takes over. Subsequent to the decriminalisation of marijuana or medical marijuana by various state governments, the Congress defunded federal marijuana drug law enforcement in states who had decriminalised marijuana. That major reform was underreported.

RT @oxfamnz @Oxfam what halved global poverty in 15 years? @NZGreens @RusselNorman @GreenpeaceNZ

The impact of economic theory on political belief

…

How did the MDGs fare?

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