The Miami Herald reports: A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history. Isn’t it such a weird coincidence that the queue […]
Communism still doing well in Cuba
Communism still doing well in Cuba
05 Aug 2024 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, economics of crime, growth disasters, income redistribution, labour economics, labour supply, law and economics, Marxist economics, property rights, Public Choice, public economics Tags: Cuba
Transgender or Intersex? Confusion Reigns Over the Gender Status of Two Olympic Boxers
04 Aug 2024 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, law and economics, politics - USA, sports economics Tags: free speech, gender gap, Olympic Games, political correctness, regressive left, sex discrimination
On Saturday, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued a surprising correction after claiming for a week that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting were actually born women and have Differences in Sexual Development (DSD), a range of rare conditions in which a person’s genitalia do not necessarily match with their chromosomes or hormone…
Transgender or Intersex? Confusion Reigns Over the Gender Status of Two Olympic Boxers
Racism is racism
02 Aug 2024 Leave a comment
in discrimination, law and economics, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - New Zealand Tags: free speech, political correctness, racial discrimination, regressive left
Some Labour and Maori Party MPs have been making appalling personal attacks on Act MP Karen Chhour: The minister has been under pressure from opposition parties over contentious policies including the re-introduction of boot camps and the repeal of Section 7AA from the Oranga Tamariki Act – removing treaty obligations from the law. But Chhour […]
Racism is racism
Don’t Mess with Texas: Fifth Circuit Rules Against the Biden Administration in Buoy Dispute on Southern Border
02 Aug 2024 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, defence economics, income redistribution, labour economics, labour supply, law and economics, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - USA, property rights, Public Choice Tags: 2024 presidential election, economics of immigration
Texas won a big victory in the United States Court of Appeals in the long struggle over floating buoy barriers in the Rio Grande River to help block unlawful migration. In United States v. Abbott, the court ruled 11-7 in an en banc decision against the Biden Administration over the barrier. It is an interesting decision […]
Don’t Mess with Texas: Fifth Circuit Rules Against the Biden Administration in Buoy Dispute on Southern Border
The Minimum Wage, Rent Control, and Vacancies or Who Searches?
31 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, econometerics, economic history, economics of regulation, income redistribution, labour economics, labour supply, law and economics, minimum wage, politics - USA, property rights, Public Choice, regulation, rentseeking, unemployment, urban economics Tags: housing affordability, regressive left, rent control
In an interesting new paper Federal Reserve economists Marianna Kudlyak, Murat Tasci and Didem Tüzemen look at what happens to job vacancy postings when the minimum wage increases. The vacancy data in our analysis come from the job openings data from the Conference Board as a part of its Help Wanted OnLine (HWOL) data series. […]
The Minimum Wage, Rent Control, and Vacancies or Who Searches?
The economics of the falling total fertility rate in New Zealand
31 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in human capital, labour economics, labour supply, politics - New Zealand, population economics Tags: ageing society, economics of fertility
Earlier this week, I was interviewed by Paul Brennan on Reality Check Radio, on New Zealand’s declining birth rate. You can listen to the interview here. We didn’t have time to go through all of the questions I was given beforehand, so I thought I would add some points here, along with some links to…
The economics of the falling total fertility rate in New Zealand
Thought and Details on the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level
30 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, budget deficits, business cycles, economic growth, economic history, history of economic thought, labour economics, macroeconomics, monetarism, monetary economics, unemployment Tags: monetary policy
The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level has been percolating among monetary theorists for over three decades: Eric Leeper being the first to offer a formalization of the idea, with Chris Sims and Michael Woodford soon contributed to its further development. But the underlying idea that the taxation power of the state is essential for […]
Thought and Details on the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level
Claudia Goldin with Kiana Scott: The Century-Long Fight to Close the Gen…
28 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, discrimination, economic history, economics of education, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, poverty and inequality Tags: gender wage gap, sex discrimination
Treasury says one thing in a speech but quite another in the BEFU
28 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in budget deficits, business cycles, economic growth, fiscal policy, inflation targeting, labour economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, politics - New Zealand, unemployment Tags: monetary policy
I picked up The Post this morning to find the lead story headlined “Recession hits homes harder than businesses”, reporting a speech given earlier this week by Treasury’s deputy secretary and chief economic adviser Dominick Stephens. There was an account of the same speech, but with some different material, on BusinessDesk a couple of days […]
Treasury says one thing in a speech but quite another in the BEFU
The Cancer Society is racist? Really?
26 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in discrimination, health economics, law and economics, politics - New Zealand Tags: political correctness, racial discrimination, regressive left
Graham Adams writes on the media’s mission to demonise NZ’s health system — Not long after I began treatment in 2015 for an aggressive leukaemia, I was phoned by a representative of the Cancer Society. A hospital oncology staffer had strongly recommended I give the organisation my name and contact details so I did. I […]
The Cancer Society is racist? Really?
Gender gaps
26 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of education, gender, human capital, labour economics Tags: gender wage gap, sex discrimination
Dawkins talks to Kathleen Stock
24 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of education, gender, health economics, labour economics, law and economics, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - USA Tags: Age of Enlightenment, conjecture and refutation, free speech, gender gap, philosophy of science, political correctness, regressive left, sex discrimination
Here we have a 55-minute (remote) conversation between Richard Dawkins and Kathleen Stock conducted during the “Dissident Dialogues” conference in NYC last May. Here’s a précis of Stock’s background from Wikipedia: Kathleen Mary Linn Stock OBE is a British philosopher and writer. She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex until 2021. She has published academic […]
Dawkins talks to Kathleen Stock
The employment effects of a guaranteed income
23 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, econometerics, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, poverty and inequality Tags: basic income
By Eva Vivalt, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander W. Bartik, David E. Broockman, Sarah Miller, Here is the link, but I am still sleeping. Here is the abstract: We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month […]
The employment effects of a guaranteed income
Interview with Edmund Phelps: Macro and Capitalism
21 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in business cycles, fiscal policy, great depression, great recession, history of economic thought, job search and matching, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, monetary economics, unemployment
Edmund Phelps won the Nobel prize in economics in 2006 for “for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy.” However, he has spent a considerable chunk of this time in the last few decades musing over strengths and weaknesses of capitalism and, more generally, a dynamic economy. Jon Hartley interviews Phelps on both topics,…
Interview with Edmund Phelps: Macro and Capitalism
Chinese Economic Policy, Part I: The Demographic Challenge
17 Jul 2024 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history, growth disasters, growth miracles, labour economics, labour supply, population economics Tags: China, economics of fertility
I’m in China this week, teaching about fiscal policy, convergence theory, and inequality at Northeastern University in Shenyang. So it’s a good opportunity to write about some pluses and minuses of Chinese economic policy. We’ll start this series by looking at demographics, which almost surely is the biggest long-run challenge for Chinese policymakers. How big […]
Chinese Economic Policy, Part I: The Demographic Challenge
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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