How warranties were made in ancient times?
25 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
Elaine has a terrific post on the history of warranties. As there were little products at that time, we didnt have product warranties. So what were warranties for? Buying brides!
In the early days of exchange, humans mostly traded consumables like food or stone tools. There wasn’t much room for misrepresentation because what you saw was what you got.
The was one exception: Brides. In many ancient civilizations, families sold their unmarried daughters to prospective bridegrooms. Barbaric, I know.
A bride was often the biggest purchase a man would ever make (these days it’s a house). But there was no way to measure the quality of the good before buying. A bridegroom couldn’t exactly, uh, take a test drive. To further complicate things, the brides were selected and paid for before they reached marriageable age. It’s kind of like how Tesla Model 3’s require a reservation deposit two years before…
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The American Antitrust Institute Fruitlessly Searches for the Key to American Competitive Conditions under the Antitrust Lamppost
06 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
We Should Not Be Subjecting Children’s Brains To Wi-Fi Screens @drjillstein
04 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
The Effect of Pension Income on Elderly Earnings: Evidence from Social Security and Full Population Data
06 Sep 2016 Leave a comment
From Gelber, Isen, and Song:
We estimate the effect of pension income on earnings by examining the Social Security Notch, which cut lifetime discounted Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) benefts by over $6,100 on average for individuals born in 1917 relative to those born in 1916. Using Social Security Administration microdata on the U.S. population by day of birth and a regression discontinuity design, we document that the Notch caused a large increase in elderly earnings. The point estimates show that a $1 increase in OASI benefits causes earnings in the elderly years to decrease by 46 to 61 cents due to an income effect, and the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that only current (not future) benefits affect earnings. Under further assumptions we rule out more than a small substitution elasticity. Our results suggest that the increase in OASI benefits from 1950 to 1985 can account…
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Reserve Bank on housing – still all over the place
19 Jul 2016 Leave a comment
As I was writing this, the Reserve Bank’s latest set of regulatory interventions and controls were announced. I haven’t yet read that document but from the press release I would make just three observations:
- The flip-flops continue. After easing the LVR restrictions for non-investors outside Auckland last year, they now plan to totally reverse that change. As a reminder, when these controls were first introduced three years ago, they were all supposed to be “temporary”. So, I suppose, were the exchange controls, introduced in 1938 and lifted in 1984,
- The consultation process is a joke. Not long ago, as part of their regulatory stocktake, the Bank indicated that it intended to put in place materially longer consultative periods for its proposed regulatory initiatives (typically six to ten weeks). But in today’s announcement they are allowing only three weeks for submissions on the new “proposals” to be made, and then plan to implement…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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