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California has some of the strictest insurance regulations in the country. It is the only state where insurers are not allowed to base their rate hikes on catastrophe models — forward-looking calculations of risk — or the rising cost of reinsurance premiums, according to both Zimmerman and the Department of Insurance. Under current regulations, insurers are only .. MORE
Featured Comment
Incentives
Last week’s issue of The Economist featured a few articles about disinformation, which it defines as “falsehoods that are intended to deceive.” More precisely, I would define it as the intentional publication or spreading of fact-related information that is nearly certainly false by a person or an organization whose self-interest it is to spread the .. MORE
Business Economics
How often have you heard a line something like the following: “Because businesses care only about making money, they and their executives are hard-hearted towards their customers and employees.” Even some people who think that, on net, businesses are good for our economy, often characterize them as being hard-hearted because of their profit motive. .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Michael Crichton once highlighted an unusual quirk in human thinking – something he called Gell-Mann Amnesia, after his friend Murray Gell-Mann. Chrichton said: Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read .. MORE
Macroeconomics
In a recent blog post, Vasant Dhar had some interesting remarks about the possible role of AI in Fed policy: Might AI help us better understand the data and design better economic policy interventions? Last week I had lunch with some central bankers who wanted to talk to me about AI. They were interested in .. MORE
Economics of Crime
This is the third in my series on the social costs of drug prohibition. You can read part one here (prison-industrial complex) and part two (police militarization) here. In the 1914 decision US v Regan, the Supreme Court held that the “rule of evidence requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt is generally applicable only .. MORE
Macroeconomics
During the period following the 2020 Covid pandemic, many countries experienced relatively high inflation. This reflects two factors: 1. All countries were hit by shocks such as Covid-related supply chain disruptions and the Ukraine war. 2. Most countries enacted very extensive stimulus programs, which had similar effects in each case. It was appropriate to allow .. MORE
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Bloggers David Henderson, Alberto Mingardi, Scott Sumner, Pierre Lemieux, Kevin Corcoran, and guests write on topical economics of interest to them, illuminating subjects from politics and finance, to recent films and cultural observations, to history and literature.
Browse our archive of posts by author last nameBooks: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Warning: There will be spoilers in this post for the plot of Dune, including plot points from the second book that will serve as the basis for the as-yet unmade third movie. The recently released Dune: Part 2 has been a big box-office success, as was the first movie. These two movies were based on .. MORE
Adam Smith
The following two quotes show a bridge between old-time classical liberals, represented by Adam Smith, the famous and 18th-century liberal economist, and Anthony de Jasay, the more radical liberal anarchist of our time. The first quote comes from the manuscript of a lecture delivered by Smith (quoted after his death but later lost): Little else .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Political and moral philosophy are related to economics, and even less stealthily to the older political economy. The economist cannot recommend a government policy without making or accepting a value judgment consistent with who is going to be helped and who will be harmed. At least, he must believe that the policy falls within the .. MORE
The role of rationally articulated ideas may be quite modest in its effect on a given election, a legislative vote, or an action of a head of state. Yet the atmosphere in which such decisions take place may be dominated by a particular vision—or by a particular conflict of visions. Where intellectuals have played a .. MORE
A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Economic Point of View: An Essay on the History of Economic Thought, by Israel Kirzner.1 What is economics, really? One popular answer to this question is: who cares? Economics is what economists do. Frank Knight famously quipped, in response to this attitude, “and economists are those who do .. MORE
Book Review of In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace, by Christopher J. Coyne.1 According to Ludwig von Mises, “economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics” ([1949] 2007, p. .. MORE
A Book Review of Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be, by Diane Coyle.1 Economics has arguably been under greater scrutiny than ever before. Its ontological premises, methodological postulates, conceptual insights, and analytical techniques are under intense appraisal within the academy, with social scientists from non-economic disciplines and even heterodox economists .. MORE
You are correct regarding cost; depending upon the state in question, housing an inmate incurs a cost between roughly $32k to $40k per year. The more the prison population grows, the more stressed corrections budgets..
Tarnell S Brown, May 1