In Part I of this series, I explained that the War on Poverty, launched by Lyndon Johnson and expanded by other profligate presidents, has been bad news for both taxpayers and poor people. More specifically, I shared some academic research showing how it led to a big increase in dependency on government. Let’s expand on […]
The gender wage gap has been decreasing slowly and steadily over time. At least, that’s what I thought until I read this 2023 NBER Working Paper by Peter Blair (Harvard University) and Benjamin Posmanick (St. Bonaventure University). They present the following graph of the gender wage gap in the US (for White women, compared with White men,…
Tweet… is from my emeritus Nobel-laureate colleague Vernon Smith‘s splendid speech “Human Betterment Through Globalization,” delivered in September 2005 at the Irvington-on-Hudson then-headquarters of the Foundation for Economic Education: The challenge is that we all function simultaneously in two overlapping worlds of exchange. First, we live in a world of personal, social exchange based on…
Appointed by new Labour PM Jacinda Ardern in 2018, Cindy Kiro headed the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) tasked with reviewing and recommending reforms to the welfare system. Kiro had been Children’s Commissioner during Helen Clark’s Labour government but returned to academia subsequently. In 2019 the WEAG reported back with 42 recommendations including:Recommendation 11: Remove…
The per capita GDP for the combined 27 countries of the European Union (EU-27) is about 72% of the US level. On the other side, the average worker in EU countries puts in far fewer hours on the job than do American workers. For example, OECD data says that the average US worker put in…
Tax rates matter for work incentives. When tax rates are high, there is less incentive for people to work. They may pass up additional work and choose leisure time instead. However, it isn’t just taxes that matter. It is the loss of other entitlements as well. All of these are bound up in what is…
Several good friends warned me not to publish Don’t Be a Feminist. I appreciate their concern, but I’m glad I kept my own counsel. Here’s my interview with Chris Williamson on the book and beyond. Apparently he’s kind of a big deal…
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. The opener is this: Can a single self-published paper really refute decades of work by three famous economists? If the paper is the modestly titled “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” then the answer — with qualifications — is yes. And…
This gem of a story is about how one Aussie university went to the logical endpoint of the diversity-trumps-merit controversy: Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane is apparently about to hire solely on the basis of diversity, and has erased any mention of the word “merit” in its hiring policy. This of course is ridiculous, […]
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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