One of the key insights of good tax policy is that people respond to incentives. If tax rates are punitive, people will do what they can to protect themselves from predatory government. Especially if they have any ability to control the timing, level, and composition of their income. Star athletes are definitely in this group. They avoid […]
Class-warfare tax policy is always a bad idea. Economists generally don’t like class-warfare policies because it is foolish to impose high marginal tax rates on productive behaviors such as investment and entrepreneurship. Politicians should not like class-warfare policies because of the negative impact on jobs and wages for ordinary people as well as the potential negative […]
When thinking about what makes an economy flourish, many of us tend to focus on the success stories of innovation and growth. After all, success stories involve an element of risk, which means a chance of failure. When it’s more expensive to fail, then avoiding the risk of failure–by avoiding innovative but risky business choices–starts…
I’m going to quote from UK’s Matt Goodwin. I do so as someone who is pro-immigration. I think moderate, controlled immigration is good for a country, and specifically has been good for New Zealand. But a good thing can become a bad thing is if it too large, or uncontrolled. If NZ took in 1…
I’m a big fan of tax migration. I cheer when productive people escape high-tax states or high-tax nations. And when the geese with the golden eggs fly away, it thwarts the plans of greedy politicians. The latest example of this is the exodus of billionaires – worried about a wealth tax – from California (the […]
Many countries, including almost all developed countries and many developing countries, are now experiencing below-replacement fertility, with fertility rates having declined substantially over the past decade or more. That means that each generation will be progressively smaller than the last, and almost inevitably that leads to a declining population (in the absence of offsetting migration…
The good news is that Europe has a lot of economic freedom by world standards. Especially Western Europe. The bad news is that economic freedom has been declining in Western Europe. To make matters worse, Europe has a big demographic problem, with a growing number of older people over time who have been promised benefits […]
In 2017, I analyzed the Uber Tipping Equilibrium: What is the effect of tipping on the take-home pay of Uber drivers? Economic theory offers a clear answer. Tipping has no effect on take home pay. The supply of Uber driver-hours is very elastic. Drivers can easily work more hours when the payment per ride increases…
How many times have I heard versions of that claim? Erik Brynjolfsson picks up the telephone in the FT: While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP…
Below is my column in the California Post and New York Post on the exodus of wealthy taxpayers from the state as Democrats seek to trap them with a retroactive wealth tax. They are engineering a type of reverse Gold Rush as up to a trillion dollars leave the state with a line of U-Hauls […]
In the United States, much of the gap in earnings between men and women is due to the persistent gap for high wage earners. This paper explores changes in the gender wage gap for MBAs graduating from a large public university over 30 years. We document large gender wage gaps on average, which grow in…
In editing two papers on Asian American immigration for the Winter 2026 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I work as Managing Editor), I found myself musing over two alternative histories: one about more such immigration, one about less. Hannah Postel describes “Asian Immigration to the United States in Historical Perspective” (Journal of Economic…
Based on a video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity back in 2010, as well a video from Johan Norberg I shared in 2016, there’s a lot to learn by looking at Swedish economic history. Here’s a more recent video that also looks at that nation’s economic track record. You’ll notice a similar message […]
One way of looking at the a policy of increased ICE enforcement of US border security is as a debate over decision error costs. The expressed goal is to remove the worst of the worst criminals. Few would disagree with this goal. However, in this dragnet, immigrants without criminal backgrounds have also been detained. The…
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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