There has been a fair bit of discussion over the Ocker court decision re Uber and their dishonest ways. In many countries, including Oz and New Zealand, Uber came in and set up illegal operations. In New Zealand they put anyone who wanted a go on their books. At that time New Zealand had rather […]
Uber
Even Lowerer Hutt
07 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, economics of bureaucracy, economics of regulation, income redistribution, law and economics, politics - New Zealand, property rights, Public Choice, regulation, urban economics Tags: housing affordability, land supply, zoning
One annoying thing about writing a Saturday column for the Stuff papers is never knowing whether a piece will show up in print.I’d thought this one was a banger. I’ll be talking about related issues tomorrow night as part of a panel for A City for People. 🟨🟪 Our speaker line up has dropped! 🟪🟨Join us on…
Even Lowerer Hutt
DON BRASH: PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT SPEECH FROM THE NEW GOVERNMENT SO FAR
03 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economics of bureaucracy, income redistribution, law and economics, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - New Zealand, property rights, Public Choice, regulation, rentseeking, transport economics, urban economics Tags: land supply, zoning
Last week, Housing Minister Chris Bishop gave perhaps the most important speech by the new Government since the election. In a speech to the Wellington Chamber of Commerce, he said he wanted the ratio of house prices to median household income to more than halve to between 3 and 5 over the next 10…
DON BRASH: PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT SPEECH FROM THE NEW GOVERNMENT SO FAR
The Uncompetitive Urban Land Markets Theory of Everything
03 Mar 2024 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, economics of bureaucracy, environmental economics, income redistribution, industrial organisation, law and economics, politics - New Zealand, property rights, Public Choice, regulation, rentseeking, urban economics Tags: housing affordability, land supply, zoning
The Housing Theory of Everything has one of those wonderful self-explanatory titles. A good title matters. The recent and thorough essay explains how the anglosphere’s unnecessarily expensive housing affects, well, everything. Or at least almost everything.Zoning makes it too hard to build houses where people want to build. Urban containment policies block new subdivisions, so…
The Uncompetitive Urban Land Markets Theory of Everything
Spot on @NZGreens
14 Aug 2021 Leave a comment
in economics of regulation, law and economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, property rights, Public Choice, public economics, regulation, rentseeking, urban economics Tags: housing affordability, land supply, zoning
The Austrian Approach to Competition Israel M. Kirzner
14 Apr 2014 Leave a comment
in Austrian economics, industrial organisation, regulation
Lee Ohanian: Hoover, Roosevelt and the Great Depression
03 Apr 2014 Leave a comment
in global financial crisis (GFC), great depression, regulation
How to Restore US Prosperity – Prof. Edward C. Prescott
29 Mar 2014 Leave a comment
in global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, labour economics, regulation
The economics of the Dallas Buyers Club
15 Mar 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism, politics - Australia, politics - USA, Public Choice, regulation Tags: AIDS, AZT, Dallas Buyers Club, David Friedman, drug lags, FDA, Matthew McConaughy, Sam Peltzman
Deciding if a new drug is safe is a serious issue. Separate to this is whether the drug is better than existing drugs.
In 1962, an amended law gave the FDA authority to judge if a new drug produced the results for which it had been developed. Formerly, the FDA monitored only drug safety. It previously had only sixty days to decide this. Drug trials can now take up to 10 years.
Who cares if a safe drug works or not? If a new drug does not work or is no better than the existing drugs on the market, the investors in the development of the new drug bear the (unrecoverable) development costs. Capitalism is a profit AND loss system. Losses are a signal that you should try something else.
Sam Peltzman showed in a famous paper in 1973 that these 1962 amendments reduced the introduction of effective new drugs in the USA from an average of forty-three annually in the decade before the 1962 amendments to sixteen annually in the ten years afterwards. No increase in drug safety was identified.
Drugs became available years after they were on the market outside the USA. To quote David Friedman:
“In 1981… the FDA published a press release confessing to mass murder. That was not, of course, the way in which the release was worded; it was simply an announcement that the FDA had approved the use of timolol, a ß-blocker, to prevent recurrences of heart attacks.
At the time timolol was approved, ß-blockers had been widely used outside the U.S. for over ten years.
It was estimated that the use of timolol would save from seven thousand to ten thousand lives a year in the U.S. So the FDA, by forbidding the use of ß-blockers before 1981, was responsible for something close to a hundred thousand unnecessary deaths.”
AZT double-blind trials collapsed in the mid-1980s in the USA because participants sold the drug in the black market.
If memory serves right, Australian drug regulators planned to duplicate these double-blind trials in Australia before approving the drug. Last time I checked, the physiology of Australians was the same as any other human being. What did they plan to find that justified the delay in approving AZT?
The duplicate double-blind AZT trials in Australia were abandoned not because they were mad and evil, but because again the participants sold the drug in the black market. That was to be expected too so the duplicate double-blind AZT trials in Australia in the 1980s were a double evil.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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