EconLog Archive
Behavioral Economics
The Respect Motive
Consider a simple model of voter behavior: People vote for whoever respects them more. My immediate reaction: This Respect Motive is a roughly accurate description of over half the electorate. Furthermore, it’s hard to name any socially recognized group whose members do not usually vote for whoever respects that group more. Example: Consider this analysis .. MORE
Book Club
EconLog Book Club Round-up: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
In case you missed any segment in The Autobiography of Malcolm X Book Club, here’s the full package: Lead-in Part #1: Malcolm’s Childhood and Entry-Level Jobs (Chapters 1-5) Part #2: Malcolm’s Life of Crime (Chapters 6-10) Part #3: Malcolm and the Nation of Islam (Chapters 11-15) Part #4: Malcolm’s Purge, Second Thoughts, and Murder (Chapters .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
Terror Profiling
Two quick replies to Garett: 1. If terrorists were as flexible as he suggests, airport security would be useless. Terrorists would simply switch to one of the countless undefended targets: trains, sporting events, malls, etc. Profiling doesn’t have to be perfect to be extremely effective, and I don’t see that Garett’s counter-examples show otherwise. Slightly .. MORE
Book Club
The Autobiography of Malcolm X Book Club, Part 4
Malcom’s Purge, Second Thoughts, and Murder (Chapters 16-19, plus Haley’s Epilogue) Summary By the early 60s, Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad’s health is failing, and internal resentment against Malcolm’s success is starting to build. He refuses publicity to calm the jealousy – even turning down a cover story from Newsweek. Yet overall, Malcolm is sitting .. MORE
Public Choice Theory
My Election Outcomes: Final Update
Or, Did I Optimize or What? I’ve posted a couple of times now (here and here) about a local election in Pacific Grove in which I took part. The proposal on the ballot, Measure A, would have imposed an added “parcel tax,” that is, a property tax, on properties in Pacific Grove. One of the .. MORE
Price Controls
Will Profiling Even Work? A Supply-Side Perspective
Bryan takes me to task for my prediction that free market airline security would still be rigorous and intrusive. His prediction: ..here’s one massive cost-cutting, convenience-raising change I’d predict in a free market: Profiling. Private security firms would still claim to treat everyone equally. But they’d wave the elderly, women, families with children, and well-dressed .. MORE
Economics of Education
Carnegie on the School Ethic
Education teaches people to show up on time, sit down, shut up, stay awake, and follow orders. So it’s tempting to say, “School inculcates the work ethic.” But that’s not quite right. School inculcates the school ethic – and while the school ethic and the work ethic overlap, the overlap is far from perfect. As .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
British Democracy and the Death Penalty
William Feerick emailed me some interesting thoughts on an old EconLog post, reprinted below with his permission. Hello Bryan, I recently came across an article you wrote some time ago on your EconLog blog, where you mentioned Tim Besley’s counter-examples to your ‘you get the Government you deserve’ argument in the UK. It was .. MORE
Labor Mobility, Immigration, Outsourcing
Mark Carney: Like William of Orange, a Political Import
You’ve heard the news already that the Bank of England is importing a high-quality central banker from Canada. This continues the tradition begun in 1688 (or was it 1066? or AD 43?) of importing the best talent rather than pushing for patriotic employment policies. The U.S. Federal Reserve is allowed to hire foreigners, a policy I .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
The False Advertising of the CFTC
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is suing one of my favorite websites and my primary source of news: Intrade. The CFTC accuses Intrade of: [O]ffering commodity option contracts to U.S. customers for trading, as well as soliciting, accepting, and confirming the execution of orders from U.S. customers, all in violation of the CFTC’s .. MORE
Family Economics
Single Parenthood: The Reason Matters
Susan Mayer’s What Money Can’t Buy concludes by tossing out a fun fact I’ve often heard repeated. (I even repeated it myself once in an exchange with Charles Murray). Both low income and single parenthood may in fact be correlated with poor outcomes for children because they are proxies for unmeasured parental characteristics. This suspicion .. MORE
Labor Market
Eliminating Conscription in Singapore
In response to co-blogger Bryan Caplan, John Smith argues that Singapore needs conscription. Here’s where economics is really helpful: in helping us understand the distinction between how big a military to have and how to man a military. Smith argues that Singapore needs a large military and argues implicitly that to have a large military, .. MORE
Public Goods
Voting, Public Goods, and Free Riders
John C. Goodman has an insightful and relatively short post this morning making the case for voting even when you’re virtually positive that doing so won’t change the outcome of an election. It reminded me of something I wrote in “Market Virtues and Community,” Chapter 11 of my The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey. .. MORE
Business Economics
Driving the Cool Kids Out
Abercrombie and Fitch doesn’t carry jeans with a waist size larger than 36 inches. But the Centers for Disease Control reports that the median American male has a 40 inch waist. Why does A&F give up on so many potential customers? The reason is obvious: They want the cool kids to buy their stuff. As .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
Hedengren’s Dog
Two decades ago, economists started taking intelligence seriously. Now economists are starting to take conscientiousness seriously. Unfortunately, most existing data sets don’t contain personality tests. Even when they do, personality tests are only self-reports. Wouldn’t it be great if we could retrofit every existing data set with a behavioral measure of conscientiousness? Wouldn’t it be .. MORE
Economics of Health Care
DeLong on Obamacare
Categorize this in the “I wish Brad had asked these questions in 2009” file. In a recent post, Brad DeLong sounds like Obamacare critic and health economist John C. Goodman. Here’s an excerpt: But Massachusetts has been walking down this exchange-and-public-program-expansion road for six years now, since Mitt Romney signed RomneyCare. Massachusetts has been vacuuming .. MORE
Cross-country Comparisons
How I See Singapore
Scott Sumner returns from Singapore with many fascinating observations, including: My guide told me that when western academics come to Singapore, the leftists tend to love the place and the libertarians often go home in disgust. I’m as libertarian as they come, and “disgust” certainly wasn’t my reaction after a one-week visit. If Singapore abolished .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
Modelling the Marriage of High Virtue and Low Cunning
David Brooks praises Lincoln for showing that the “challenge of politics lies precisely in the marriage of high vision and low cunning.” He elaborates: The movie is about pushing the 13th Amendment through the House of Representatives. The political operatives Lincoln hires must pay acute attention to the individual congressmen in order to figure out .. MORE
Income Distribution
How do you Sustain the Second Freest Economy in the World?
In an excellent Singapore econ-travelogue, Scott Sumner writes: My theory is that leftists don’t really mind a place where income is unequal, they don’t like places where income looks unequal. This is close to what pioneering blogger Mickey Kaus has been pushing for since, oh, the invention of the New Democrats. I’ve never read his .. MORE
Upcoming Events
Arnold Kling’s New Blog
Many of the visitors to this blog were disappointed when Arnold Kling stopped blogging in August, actually three months ago today. This blog owes a lot to Arnold: he started Econlog under a different name. The good news for Arnold’s fans, of whom there are many, is that he is now blogging again. His blog .. MORE
Economic History
Joseph Schmidt and the Tragedy of Discrimination
This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for Joseph Schmidt (1904-1942), my favorite new-to-me opera singer. His music is wonderfully sweet (start here and here), and his life story a lesson to us all. Despite his voice, Schmidt had a problem that seemingly precluded a career in opera: he was really, really short – just 4’9”. Contemporary audiences .. MORE