Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux February 3, 2012

… is from page 61 of Frank Trentmann’s important 2008 book Free Trade Nation – a book that I thank Walter Grinder for bringing to my attention.  In the section of the book from which the following quotation is taken, Trentmann is discussing Joseph Chamberlain’s “Tariff Reform” – an attempt, at the dawn of the [...]

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More British “austerity”

by Russ Roberts February 2, 2012

Dean Baker comments on British austerity: We have thousands of people in Washington who seem convinced that if the government would just stop spending money and lay off more employees then the private sector would respond with increased output and hiring. While this might seem implausible on its face (what business hires people because the [...]

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Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux February 2, 2012

… is from pages 191-192 of Steven Landsburg’s 2009 book The Big Questions: Your kids look to you for guidance, while your congressman looks to you only for votes.  So, quite sensibly, you think a lot harder and more clearly about what you’ll tolerate from your kids than what you’ll tolerate from your congressman.

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A Question for Protectionists

by Don Boudreaux February 2, 2012

Congressional Quarterly reports (unfortunately gated) that several members of Congress – from both parties – seek to raise tariffs on Americans who buy foreign goods that (allegedly) are subsidized by foreign governments – with the Chinese government, of course, being singled out as a culprit apparently guilty of special deviousness at foisting low-priced goods on [...]

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Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux February 1, 2012

… is from page 19 of Peter Bauer’s and Alan Walter’s 1975 article – published in the April 1975 issue of the Journal of Law & Economics – entitled “The State of Economics“: The prestige of econometrics has probably contributed to the widespread tendency to forget that in social study quantification is often, perhaps even [...]

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Some Links

by Don Boudreaux January 31, 2012

Stuart Anderson sensibly proposes mandatory national-service for New York Times columnists.  (Why is it that so many people, upon noticing – or imagining that they notice – a “social” problem, immediately jump to the conclusion that deploying government-directed force is the best way to “solve” that problem?  Such an attitude reveals an astonishing (1) lack [...]

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Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux January 31, 2012

… is from page 160 of the 1998 reissue of Trevor Colbourn’s excellent 1965 book The Lamp of Experience: Efforts at Parliamentary tyranny were the more frightening to [Benjamin] Franklin because he knew “a single Man may be afraid or sham’d of doing Injustice.  A Body is never either one or the other, if it [...]

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Some Links

by Don Boudreaux January 30, 2012

Tim Worstall – who’s always worth reading – chimes in on Apple’s use of workers in low-wage countries.  More Tim. In yesterday’s New York Times, columnist Ross Douthat makes a profoundly important point. Sheldon Richman examines Pres. Obama’s cases for tax “fairness.” Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wonders why someone must be licensed by the [...]

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Krugman’s Austere Science

by Don Boudreaux January 30, 2012

In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman blames Britain’s economic woes on the British government’s alleged policy of “austerity.”  Yet he offers no evidence that Her Majesty’s government is actually pursuing such a policy. Fortunately, Scott Sumner checked some relevant facts.  From data on the 44 major world economies listed in The Economist‘s [...]

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Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux January 30, 2012

… is from page 310 of the 1981 translation of Fernand Braudel’s remarkable 1979 The Structures of Everyday Life: The problem posed by the defective emptying of cesspools in Paris even worried the Academy of Sciences in 1788.  And chamber pots, as always, continued to be emptied out of windows; the streets were sewers…..  The [...]

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The K word

by Russ Roberts January 29, 2012

Jerry Jordan makes the case against what he call K-brand economics. (HT: Dan Klein) Very well done. An excerpt: It is tempting to think that the Soviets perfected negative-value-added investment — the stuff produced is worth less than the value of the resources to produce it. However, most families have experienced this first hand. It [...]

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Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux January 29, 2012

… is from page 184 of Thomas Cahill’s delightful 2003 volume Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter: Though such an “ideal” has little appeal to those who lived through the bleak twentieth-century utopias of fascism and communism, there seems always to be someone, somewhere who dreams of implementing a new version of Plato’s [...]

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Change incentives instead of regulating outcomes

by Russ Roberts January 27, 2012

Deep insight from Eugene White in this paper (HT: Scott Sumner) The fantastically costly failures of banks and other financial intermediaries are a consequence of appallingly bad choices made by managers. To gain unseemly executive compensation, managers had incentives to exploit conflicts of interests, increase leverage, and choose risky trades, instruments and portfolios. Reacting to [...]

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Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux January 27, 2012

… is from pages 8-9 of Mark Pennington’s 2011 book Robust Political Economy: Moreover, insofar as market failure theorists are right to focus on ‘incentive compatibility’, they fail to appy this analysis to their favoured institutional alternatives.  A consistent analysis of collective action and asymmetric information problems reveals that these are often more pronounced in [...]

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Dicey Economics

by Don Boudreaux January 26, 2012

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal: Lobbyist Scott Paul details the bounty that American tire producers now reap from the Obama administration’s tariff on Americans who buy Chinese tires (Letters, Jan. 26).  He then asserts that these gains prove the tariff’s merit. Bull. The argument against tariffs is not that they fail to [...]

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Dan Klein’s new book

by Russ Roberts January 26, 2012

Here is Dan Klein talking about his new book, Knowledge and Coordination: His EconTalk episode on the book is here.  

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