@NaomiAKlein agrees with #MiltonFriedman on Mancur Olson’s theory of how nations escape institutional sclerosis
25 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, income redistribution, Marxist economics, Milton Friedman, Public Choice, rentseeking, technological progress Tags: expressive voting, interest groups, Leftover Left, logic of collective action, Mancur Olson, Naomi Klein, pressure groups, rational ignorance, rational irrationality, rise and decline of nations, Twitter left
Source: quoted by Naomi Klein in “The Shock Doctrine”.
LA premiere tonight @NaomiAKlein @avilewis @mrdannyglover in person Q&A 7.30pm sundancecinemas.com http://t.co/wRkPFbnUHu—
Changes Everything (@thischanges) October 16, 2015
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.
Source: Obituary: Professor Mancur Olson | Obituaries | News | The Independent
The Economics of Red State vs. Blue State Carbon Politics
25 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, climate change, constitutional political economy, economics of climate change, economics of media and culture, economics of regulation, energy economics, environmental economics, environmentalism, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, Public Choice, transport economics, urban economics
1. My JPAM 2000 paper documents that suburbanites drive more and consume more electricity than urban residents.
2. My 2011 JUE paper documents that center city liberal resident NIMBY zoning regulation has deflected more development to the suburbs where people live a high carbon life (see paper #1 above) and then oppose carbon pricing.
3. My co-authored 2013 JPUBE paper documents that energy intensive manufacturing industries seek out cheap electricity price areas. Whether U.S carbon pricing and the resulting higher electricity prices would nudge them to move oversees remains an open question.
4. My co-authored 2012 EER paper documents that more educated people are more likely to have installed solar panels and to go off the grid and thus not pay higher electricity prices.
5. My 2013 EI paper documents that Congress Representatives oppose carbon mitigation regulation when they are conservative, their district is poorer and their district is high carbon. Nancy Pelosi and Tom Steyer are in liberal, rich, low carbon San Francisco. There, it is easy to comply with carbon regulation. They will pay few new costs for such low carbon regulation.
6. My co-authored 2015 JAERE paper documents that even in California and within counties that suburbanites vote against low carbon regulation relative to center city residents. Since we control for the fact that liberals live in center cities, this 3rd variable does not explain the urban form/voting correlation.
7. In my co-authored 2015 JUE paper we document that U.S protectionism through the Buy America Act has hindered the improvement of our bus fleet as a green technology.
Source: Environmental and Urban Economics: The Economics of Red State vs. Blue State Carbon Politics
Angus Deaton on slow growth as a force for distributional conflict
25 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles, income redistribution, liberalism, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: Angus Deaton, The Great Enrichment, The Great Escape, The Great Fact
@SeumasMilne could @jeremycorbyn win?
23 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, Joseph Schumpeter, Public Choice Tags: British Labour Party, British politics, expressive voting, Leftover Left, rational ignorance, rational irrationality, Twitter left, voter demographics
Catch-Up Service: the popularity and unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn's policies @IndyVoices independent.co.uk/voices/comment… http://t.co/9c9gmHzKFg—
John Rentoul (@JohnRentoul) October 16, 2015
While standard British Labour Party populist policies resonate with the electorate, all the policies that Jeremy Corbyn brings as a socialist, peacenik and renegade Liberal are deeply unpopular and will be used against him as wedge issues by the Tories.
The popularity of individual policies in the Labour Party manifesto didn’t do them any good at the 2015 general election.
Public don't think Corbyn will succeed – y-g.co/1MspFMb http://t.co/4jjHbfsktC—
(@YouGov) September 17, 2015
What matters to the voters at the last British general election was that brand Labour was down on the nose. It was not a credible alternative government.
Peter Kellner: Measuring the gap between Corbyn’s supporters and Labour’s target voters – y-g.co/1izSpph http://t.co/f1NaNL4xgt—
(@YouGov) September 25, 2015
Jeremy Corbyn makes that gap into a chasm because of the vast difference between what his supporters on the left of the Labour Party want and what the voters who must be persuaded to switch their vote for Labour to win in 2020 want as government policies.
Jeremy Corbyn 'twice as left-wing' as Ed Miliband – y-g.co/1LLWUsG http://t.co/no9euWcM2X—
(@YouGov) September 29, 2015
Jeremy Corbyn is much further to the left than Ed Miliband, who lost the election in 2015 rather badly because he was too far to the left for the taste of the British electorate.
Fascinating. Yawning chasm between why Labour members think they lost and why voters think they did. From @thetimes http://t.co/MvhZYI2CTr—
Joe Watts (@JoeWatts_) July 23, 2015
Ed Miliband was rejected in the 2015 British election because he was not a fiscal conservative nor a credible economic manager. The anti-austerity message loses votes.
The heaviest suicide note in history http://t.co/1xDQlnnWU7—
Phil Rodgers (@PhilRodgers) May 03, 2015
There is a yawning chasm between the reasons why the left of the Labour Party thinks their party lost the 2015 British general election and why Labour voters thought they lost the election.
Peter Mandelson in the New York Times on why Labour lost: nytimes.com/2015/05/20/opi… http://t.co/pzbIXOmwpX—
Alex Wickham (@WikiGuido) May 19, 2015
The anti-austerity message was one of the reasons why Labour lost in the eyes of its own voters and would-be voters in the centre of politics
Peter Kellner on Jeremy Corbyn as Britain’s least popular new opposition leader – y-g.co/1LdnNoP http://t.co/Ygyo8gV1uZ—
(@YouGov) October 05, 2015
The deep unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn cannot be understated as a barrier to British Labour winning the next election.
That deep unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn sacrifices the one winning advantage that British Labour has under Jeremy Corbyn. That advantage is governments tend to lose elections rather than oppositions win them.
Schumpeter disputed the widely held view that democracy was a process by which the electorate identified the common good, and a particular party was then elected by the voters because it was the most suited to carrying out this agreed common good:
- The people’s ignorance and superficiality meant that they were manipulated by politicians who set the agenda.
- Although periodic votes legitimise governments and keep them accountable, their policy programmes are very much seen as their own and not that of the people, and the participatory role for individuals is limited.
Schumpeter’s theory of democratic participation is voters have the ability to replace political leaders through periodic elections.
Citizens do have sufficient knowledge and sophistication to vote out leaders who are performing poorly or contrary to their wishes. The power of the electorate to turn elected officials out of office at the next election gives elected officials an incentive to adopt policies that do not outrage public opinion and administer the policies with some minimum honesty and competence.
Denis Healey's speech to Labour conference after 1959 defeat. http://t.co/BTdbfJj147—
Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) October 03, 2015
Power rotates in the Schumpeterian sense. Governments were voted out when they disappointed voters with the replacement not necessarily having very different policies.
Here is the Commons motion slamming Corbyn as a threat when the IRA bomber row broke in 1987: sunnation.co.uk/jeremy-corbyn-… http://t.co/KiOEUkqi9a—
Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) September 19, 2015
The challenge for British Labour is Corbyn cannot win unless he projects minimal competence and stops having policies on defence, foreign affairs and terrorism that outrage public opinion.
Jeremy Corbyn has plenty of outrageous opinions and is yet to show even the most basic competence in running the office of opposition leader, working 24/7 as opposition leader, and showing some ability to win support from members of the Parliamentary Labour Party. If Jeremy Corbyn cannot win votes of his own MPs, what chance do he have with the British people whose interests he claims to champion.
@EricCrampton @KhyaatiA should New Zealand divide into Cantons?
22 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economics of bureaucracy, politics - New Zealand, Public Choice Tags: economics of federalism, Switzerland
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.
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.
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.
Half the world's population lives inside this circle. http://t.co/XlTeEsTZkn—
Weird Science (@weird_sci) October 17, 2015
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).
@Maori_Party The greatest advantage of being colonised by the British
20 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, Public Choice Tags: age of empires, British empire, British justice
HT: David Friedman.
@GreenpeaceNZ @jamespeshaw The Futility and Farce of Global Climate Negotiations @RichardTol
18 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, development economics, economics of bureaucracy, environmental economics, environmentalism, global warming, growth disasters, growth miracles, international economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: bootleggers and baptists, climate alarmism, expressive voting, free-riders, global warming, green tariffs, international public goods, Leftover Left, New Zealand Greens, Twitter left
It is time for the environmental movement to face up to the fact that there never will be an international treaty to restrain carbon emissions. The practical way to respond to global warming is healthier is wealthier, richer is safer. Faster economic growth creates more resources for resilience and adaptation to a changing environment.
NEW REPORT: The Futility and Farce of Global Climate Negotiations bit.ly/1LvFFv3 http://t.co/TwbFUwaPlm—
Manhattan Institute (@ManhattanInst) October 17, 2015
India's target compared to its recent history http://t.co/pIvwhoSTpL—
Richard Tol (@RichardTol) October 02, 2015
@NiceMangos How renegade liberals promote intolerance against Islam
16 Oct 2015 1 Comment
in constitutional political economy, liberalism
How ‘Regressive Progressives’ and ‘Illiberal liberals’ promote intolerance Towards Muslims http://t.co/2EblbHyumR—
Eiynah — (@NiceMangos) October 09, 2015
Is Liberal (Canadian) Media Silencing non-orthodox/ex-Muslim voices? nicemangos.blogspot.ca/2015/10/is-lib… #cdnpoli #elxn42 #niqab http://t.co/G5cUjIu2Sb—
Eiynah — (@NiceMangos) October 15, 2015
Source: Deconstructing Chomsky – Reason.com.
HT: Lorenzo Michael Warby.
Candidate Lessig’s Bad Example
11 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economic history, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: campaign finance reform, campaign finance regulation
Denis Healey (1959) on the moral righteousness of @jeremycorbyn
05 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: British politics, Denis Healey, Leftover Left, Twitter left
Denis Healey's speech to Labour conference after 1959 defeat. http://t.co/BTdbfJj147—
Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) October 03, 2015
Denis Healey, writing in 1989. http://t.co/wTSehilpoB—
Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) October 03, 2015
Economic liberty and human flourishing: A discussion with Deirdre McCloskey, Susan Shell, and Yuval Levin
04 Oct 2015 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, economic history, Marxist economics Tags: Deirdre McCloskey, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
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