Bob Edlin writes – News has reached Professor Jerry Coyne of the New Zealand Parliament debating a bill (which passed on its first reading) that would legally define a “man” and a “woman” this way: 13A Meaning of woman or female In any legislation, regardless of gender identity,— (a) woman means an adult human biological […]
Coyne is keeping an eye on the legislation to define women and men
Coyne is keeping an eye on the legislation to define women and men
10 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, law and economics, politics - New Zealand, property rights Tags: sex discrimination
Missing women on Indian streets
09 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, development economics, discrimination, econometerics, economics of crime, gender, growth miracles, law and economics Tags: sex discrimination
How absent are women from city streets in the developing world? We answer this question using GPS-linked wearable cameras and randomized street audits across ~900 kilometers of roads in greater Mumbai. Across 4000+ street images containing 23,000+ visible person observations, women account for 16.4% of visible people in Mumbai and 14.7% in Navi Mumbai, far…
Missing women on Indian streets
The Court martial of Jackie Robinson.
08 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in defence economics, discrimination, economics of crime, law and economics, politics - USA, war and peace Tags: racial discrimination, World War II
Jack Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American professional baseball second baseman who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era.Robinson broke the baseball color line when the Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base on April 15, 1947. The Dodgers, by signing Robinson, heralded the end of racial segregation in professional baseball that had relegated black players to […]
The Court martial of Jackie Robinson.
Do falling birth rates boost per capita income?
06 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, econometerics, economic growth, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics Tags: economics of fertility
The secular decline in birth rates across the globe over the past seven decades has slowed population growth, raised average ages, and reshaped labor markets and the macroeconomy. Contrary to the widespread expectation that these trends hamper economic growth, we find lower birth rates are associated with higher growth in GDP per working-age adult across…
Do falling birth rates boost per capita income?
Supreme Court upholds ban on trans-identified men participating in sports in public schools
03 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, law and economics, politics - USA, property rights Tags: political correctness, regressive left, sex discrimination
In a decision split along ideological lines yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on trans-identified boys and men competing in girl’s and women’s sports were Constitutionally legal. Although the judges were unanimous in arguing that those laws did not violate Civil Rights laws (Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education), they…
Supreme Court upholds ban on trans-identified men participating in sports in public schools
Typewriters and fertility
01 Jul 2026 1 Comment
in discrimination, economic history, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice Tags: economics of fertility
Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed…
Typewriters and fertility
I’m a non-gestating parent!
26 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, law and economics, politics - USA Tags: political correctness, regressive left, sex discrimination
The NY Post reports: A woke new bill erases the terms “mother” and “father” from state child custody and parental laws — a gender-neutral rewriting that’s expected to spark a flood of similarly clunky legislation. “Mother” would be replaced with “gestating parent” while “father” becomes “non-gestating parent” or “parent” in family court along with in domestic and education law,…
I’m a non-gestating parent!
Slow Growth: Mexico Edition
23 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, economics of regulation, labour economics, Public Choice Tags: Mexico
For the last eight years or so, going back before the pandemic, Mexico’s economy has been growing at 1% per year or less, which is barely faster than the population of Mexico has been growing. It is a fact of arithmetic that an upper-middle-income country, as Mexico is classified by the World Bank, will not…
Slow Growth: Mexico Edition
Adrian Wooldridge on Sweden and liberalism
20 Jun 2026 1 Comment
in economic growth, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics Tags: Sweden
Sweden is continuing to reap the rewards of this mixture of fiscal rectitude and pro-market reforms. GDP is projected to grow by 1.8% to 1.9% this year; headline inflation stands at 1.5%; debt-to-GDP ratio is one of the lowest in the world, at just above 35%. There are some flies in this ointment, of course:…
Adrian Wooldridge on Sweden and liberalism
A Nordic Nightmare for AOC
19 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic growth, economic history, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, Marxist economics, politics - USA Tags: taxation and entrepreneurship, taxation and investment, taxation and labour supply
In 2015, I wrote a column entitled “A Nordic Nightmare for Bernie Sanders.” Today, let’s do something similar, but this time I’ll explain why economic data from northernmost Europe is bad news for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’m motivated to address the issue because I just saw this tweet about how Scandinavian-Americans are much richer than their […]
A Nordic Nightmare for AOC
Quarter of a million children are now dependent on welfare
18 Jun 2026 1 Comment
in labour economics, politics - New Zealand, poverty and inequality, welfare reform
It’s appalling that a quarter of a million children now need an income from the state to feed, clothe and house them.Data released under the Official Information Act shows over a quarter of a million children were dependent on welfare at December 2025.At 31 December 2025 there were 255,300 children aged 0-17 reliant on a…
Quarter of a million children are now dependent on welfare
Caplan-Jones UATX Debate Video
17 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, Austrian economics, development economics, labour economics, labour supply, law and economics, liberalism, libertarianism, politics - USA Tags: economics of immigration
Here’s the full video from my recent immigration debate at UATX with Garett Jones. Coleman Hughes moderates. (A great guy, and not only did we finally meet in person for dinner; he also came to UATX karaoke!) Here are more debate details from the UATX Substack. I’ve got multiple post-debate commentary essays in my queue,…
Caplan-Jones UATX Debate Video
Watermelon Economics
16 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in development economics, fiscal policy, human capital, income redistribution, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, poverty and inequality, Public Choice Tags: development aid, regressive left, taxation and entrepreneurship, taxation and investment, top 1%
Remember Thomas Piketty, the pro-class-warfare economist who is infamous for shoddy analysis and who also made a fool of himself by asserting back in 2023 that Javier Milei’s election in Argentina would lead to economic disaster? Yes, that Thomas Piketty. It turns out he’s also a “watermelon,” which is the derisive term for leftists who […]
Watermelon Economics
Quotation of the Day…
15 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, history of economic thought, labour economics, labour supply, unions
Tweet… is from page 88 of Art Carden’s and Ilia Murtazasvili’s paper “W.H. Hutt: An Economist for the Twenty-First Century,” which is a chapter in 2026 book Unsung Heroes of the Market: The 24 Underrated Economists You Need to Know – a volume edited by Robert Whaples, Christopher Coyne, Gregory Robson, and Diana Thomas [original emphasis;…
Quotation of the Day…
Piketty’s Eco-Marxist Utopia: Why Degrowth and Global Redistribution Will Trap the Poor in Poverty
13 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, development economics, econometerics, economic growth, economic history, economics of climate change, economics of regulation, energy economics, environmental economics, environmentalism, fiscal policy, global warming, human capital, income redistribution, industrial organisation, international economics, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, Public Choice, public economics Tags: climate activists, climate alarmism, regressive left
The world’s poor deserve better than another utopia designed for them by the globalist intelligentsia. They deserve cheap energy, open markets, secure property rights, and the freedom to industrialise on terms they choose for themselves. That is what worked in East Asia. It is what will work in South Asia, Africa and Latin America. And…
Piketty’s Eco-Marxist Utopia: Why Degrowth and Global Redistribution Will Trap the Poor in Poverty
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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