Richard Epstein on discrimination in the marketplace
31 Jul 2019 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of information, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, law and economics, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, Richard Epstein, survivor principle Tags: market selection, racial discrimination, sex discrimination
Geoffrey Heal on the carbon tax might be a waste of time? @jamespeshaw @greenpeace
31 Jul 2019 Leave a comment
in energy economics, environmental economics, global warming, history of economic thought, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, Public Choice, public economics Tags: carbon tax, offsetting behaviour, The fatal conceit, unintended consequences
@GlennLoury sees this refocusing on risk management as a bad thing? @sst_nz
31 Jul 2019 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of crime, labour economics, law and economics, occupational choice, politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: crime and punishment, criminal deterrence, law and order
Thoughtful analysis of productivity from the Opposition
31 Jul 2019 Leave a comment
The Opposition in the Australian Federal Parliament that is.
In my post yesterday, I noted that Simon Bridges’s latest speech continued the pattern in which our Opposition pretends there is no real structural problem in the New Zealand economy: no decades of productivity underperformance, no near-complete absence of any productivity growth in the last several years (whether under National or Labour).
And so it was some mix of refreshing and depressing (would that it were so in our country) to yesterday read a new paper by the Australian Shadow Assistant Minister for Treaasury on “tackling Australia’s productivity crisis”. No doubt it helps that the Shadow Assistant Minister was previously a professor of economics at the Australian National University (I wrote about a paper he gave in New Zealand last year here). And perhaps the political context is different: it is now six years since the ALP was in…
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Friedman and Schwartz, Eichengreen and Temin, Hawtrey and Cassel
31 Jul 2019 Leave a comment
Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin are two of the great economic historians of our time, writing, in the splendid tradition of Charles Kindleberger, profound and economically acute studies of the economic and financial history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most notably they have focused on periods of panic, crisis and depression, of which by far the best-known and most important episode is the Great Depression that started late in 1929, bottomed out early in 1933, but lingered on for most of the 1930s, and they are rightly acclaimed for having emphasized and highlighted the critical role of the gold standard in the Great Depression, a role largely overlooked in the early Keynesian accounts of the Great Depression. Those accounts identified a variety of specific shocks, amplified by the volatile entrepreneurial expectations and animal spirits that drive, or dampen, business investment, and further exacerbated by inherent instabilities in market…
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Amidst howls of “racism”, protesters demand an agency boss’s resignation because – begorrah – she is Irish
31 Jul 2019 Leave a comment
The Hands Off Our Tamariki Network has an admirable ring to its name. Here’s hoping everybody gets the message because if whanau members kept their hands off their tamaraki … well, there would be no need for a state agency to intervene and get its hands on the victims of domestic violence.
The reasons why the Oranga Tamariki agency becomes involved in caring for children has been somewhat downplayed by speakers at protest meetings who demand the state leave their mokopuna alone and insist Māori be the ones caring for their children.
Yet while they call for the state to stay away when Maori children are involved, paradoxically they want the government to do something:
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Interview: David Friedman on legal systems very different to ours
31 Jul 2019 Leave a comment
in David Friedman, economic history, economics of crime, law and economics, property rights
George Stigler on workers of the world uniting and voting with their feet
31 Jul 2019 Leave a comment
How big was that asteroid?
30 Jul 2019 Leave a comment
in economics of natural disasters Tags: space
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