Lost on @AOC @BERNIESANDERS
21 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, development economics, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, entrepreneurship, growth disasters, growth miracles, history of economic thought, human capital, income redistribution, industrial organisation, Joseph Schumpeter, labour economics, labour supply, liberalism, libertarianism, Marxist economics, occupational choice, poverty and inequality, property rights, Public Choice, public economics, survivor principle Tags: top 1%
.@AOC @berniesanders
21 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economic history, entrepreneurship, human capital, income redistribution, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, poverty and inequality, Public Choice, survivor principle Tags: regressive, top 1%
The Negative Relationship between Welfare and Work
21 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
Ten days ago, I shared some data and evidence illustrating how redistribution programs result in high implicit tax rates and thus discourage low-income people from climbing the economic ladder.
Simply stated, why work harder or work more when an additional dollar of income only leads to a net benefit of 10 cents or 20 cents? Or why work harder or work more when you can actually wind up being worse off?
Or why work at all if the governments provides enough goodies?
But don’t ask such questions if you’re in the same room as Helaine Olen of the Washington Post. She is very upset that some people think welfare payments discourage work.
It’s a dangerous myth, this idea that government help causes some people to just loaf off. It’s also untrue.Reminder: Before the pandemic, most working-age people receiving benefits like food stamps worked. They just didn’t…
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Canada 2021
21 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
So election day is here already in the Canadian federal general election of 2021. The election was called in mid August, but otherwise would not have been due till 2023.
The final CBC Poll Tracker has the nationwide votes really close, at 31.5% to 31.0%, the Liberals being barely in front. The NDP is on 19.1%. For comparison, in 2019, these parties’ vote percentages were 33.1, 34.4, and 15.9, respectively. Note that the Conservatives led in the votes, but the Liberals led in seats (157 to the Conservative’s 121 and NDP’s 24). The Poll Tracker for the other parties has the following vote percentages (with last election’s results in parentheses) has the PPC on 7.0 (1.6), Bloc Quebecois on 6.8 (7.7), and Greens 3.5 (6.5).
The Poll Tracker’s seat projections currently have Liberals at 155, Conservatives 119, NDP 32, BQ 31, Green 1, PPC 0. The “likely” range for…
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Why the Year 1816 Was the Year Without Summer
21 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of media and culture, environmental economics
David Friedman is questioning whether global warming is a net negative
21 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, David Friedman, development economics, econometerics, economic history, economics of natural disasters, energy economics, environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate adaptation, climate changes
Finally a real crisis: shortage of carbon dioxide
20 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
The UK shut down cheap coal, refused to drill for its own gas, and failed to replace its old nuclear power stations then, when gas suddenly becomes expensive, is caught with its proverbial trousers down. So much for ‘world leading’ climate policies.
– – –
As energy prices in Europe go through the roof, factories are beginning to shut down and food is disappearing from the shelves, say The Times & The GWPF.
Welcome to green Britain, offering a foretaste of what life will be like under Net Zero conditions – poorer, colder, hungrier – unless Government changes course.
Acute food shortages were feared last night after high gas prices forced most of Britain’s commercial production of carbon dioxide to shut down.
Emergency talks were being held between government officials and food producers, retailers and the energy industry with warnings of a “black swan event”, an extremely rare blow with unpredictable…
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Puzzling over the New Zealand macro data
20 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
I have no doubt that our labour market has been tight and that core inflation has been rising (finally above the target midpoint). It won’t make that much difference in the long-run, but it is a shame the “Level 4 lockdown” didn’t come a day or two later because if it had the Reserve Bank would, appropriately enough, have raised the OCR. I also don’t have any reason to doubt that there was a lot of GDP growth in the June quarter.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some puzzles.
According to the official data the New Zealand economy is quite a lot bigger than it was pre-Covid, Of the two quarterly measures of real GDP, one was 5.3 per cent higher in the June quarter than it had been in the December 2019 quarter and the other was 4.3 per cent higher. Average the two and the best guess…
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A Keynote Speech & Dialogue with 2004 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Prof. Finn Kydland
20 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, budget deficits, business cycles, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, defence economics, economic growth, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, Edward Prescott, entrepreneurship, fiscal policy, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, growth disasters, growth miracles, history of economic thought, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, law and economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, property rights, Public Choice
Ten Minute English and British History #07 – The Late Anglo-Saxons and King Cnut
20 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
in economic history Tags: British history
The Science of Bias, Empathy, and Dehumanization | Paul Bloom | Big Think
20 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
in economics of crime, economics of education, economics of media and culture, law and economics Tags: evolutionary psychology, moral psychology, political psychology
Fawlty Towers
20 Sep 2021 Leave a comment
The key to good comedy is timing, someone once said. If that is the case John Cleese and Connie Booth must have the best sense of timing ever.
As the title suggests I am talking about ‘Fawlty Towers’ although it may seem there were hundreds of episodes, there were in fact only 12, spread over 2 seasons.
The first episode of Fawlty Towers aired on 19 September 1975. Audiences were keen to see what John Cleese would do after Monty Python, but at first the situation comedy received some less than enthusiastic reviews. However the strength of the writing and casting – with Cleese as hotelier Basil Fawlty – ensured the series was a great success.
The series is set in Fawlty Towers, a fictional hotel in the seaside town of Torquay on the English Riviera. The plots centre on the tense, rude and put-upon owner Basil Fawlty (Cleese), his…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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