Timeless Tips for ‘Simple Sabotage’ — Central Intelligence Agency
21 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, organisational economics, personnel economics, war and peace Tags: sabotage
The more accurate opinion polling question
19 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in election campaigns, entrepreneurship, market efficiency Tags: opinion polls, prediction markets
“Regardless of whom they supported, which candidate did people expect to win? Americans consistently, and correctly, said that they thought Mr. Bush would.
A version of that question has produced similarly telling results throughout much of modern polling history, according to a new academic study.
Over the last 60 years, poll questions that asked people which candidate they expected to win have been a better guide to the outcome of the presidential race than questions asking people whom they planned to vote for, the study found.”
Via http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/us/politics/a-better-poll-question-to-predict-the-election.html
Market inefficiency is revealed through a process of entrepreneurial discovery
13 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
Who Is More Irrational – Consumers or Regulators?
08 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of regulation, energy economics, entrepreneurship, environmental economics, environmentalism, global warming Tags: Bjørn Lomborg, expressive voting, futile gestures, global warming, Kip Viscusi, nanny state, regulatory failure, The fatal conceit, The pretence to knowledge
A study by Ted Gayer and W. Kip Viscusi looked into this implied irrationality of consumers. They have found no empirical evidence to support the view that if consumers are so irrational that government agencies must prohibit certain energy consuming products for us to make the right choices:
Rather than accept the implications that consumers and firms are acting so starkly against their economic interest, a more plausible explanation is that there is something incorrect in the assumptions being made in the regulatory impact analyses.
Indeed, upon closer inspection it is apparent that there is no empirical evidence provided for the types of consumer failures alleged.
Even the EPA acknowledged this logical gap in its economic analysis of energy efficiency regulations:
it is a conundrum from an economic perspective that these large fuel savings have not been provided by automakers and purchased by consumers
Not surprisingly Kip Viscusi observed that
The regulatory impact analyses examined in this study contain virtually no empirical evidence to support the irrationality proposition.
• This proposition ignores the fact that consumers and firms purchase products based on a number of factors—only one of which is energy efficiency.
• Government agencies exhibit a parochial bias by ignoring all product attributes other than energy efficiency.
Six of the world’s seven billion people have mobile phones – but only 4.5 billion have a toilet, according to a U.N. report
06 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
Film review – Elysium
03 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, development economics, economic growth, entrepreneurship, history of economic thought, law and economics, liberalism, P.T. Bauer, politics - USA, property rights, Public Choice, Rawls and Nozick, technological progress Tags: democracies, movies, rule of law, The Great Enrichment
Elysium was on TV. When I saw it on the big screen, no one told me it was a depiction of contemporary capitalism and the class war.
I read it as a contrast between third world countries lacking the rule of law and capitalist democracies.
The ships shooting up to the space station reminded me of Cubans trying to cross into the USA by boat to Florida.
Sorry, but I am just a simple country boy from the back blocks of Tasmania.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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