NYT discovers that people respond to incentives!

Here’s a hilariously pathetic choice of words in the blurb of a New York Times piece published today. It turns out that generous maternity leave and flexible rules on part-time work can make it harder for women to be promoted — or even hired at all. “It turns out….” Please. It’s as if this author has […]

Even more thoughts on incentives

The topic of the War in Afghanistan came up at a recent seminar I attended. One participant claimed that President Obama pulled the troops out of Afghanistan because of political pressure. Everyone quickly nodded in agreement as he continued with the rest of his comments. This reminded me of the argument that politicians increase spending […]

Economists, too, respond to incentives

From Luigi Zingales writing in Capital Ideas: Regulators depend on the regulated for much of the information they need to do their job properly, and this dependency encourages regulators to cater to the regulated. The regulated are also perhaps the primary audience of the regulators, as taxpayers and other citizens have much less incentive to monitor […]

Projects

As you’ll see, I like to keep busy. DAY JOBPeopleFish (Founder/CEO) SIDE-GIGSMailThis (send ? from your ?)Incentivist (managed consumer incentives)SurveySays (survey 300 people for $99)Government Failure (library of government failures) CONSULTING (past & present)Alexander MannBissellGetaroundGrove City CollegeMITProcter & GambleSpaceXStanfordState DepartmentUSDA WRITINGStartup Grind (startups)FEE (economics)Mises Institute (economics)First Things (religion) SELECTED ESSAYSMy Fundamental Argument Against Socialism (2020)Optimism is […]

Daniels on bogus illnesses

Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple) on “bogus illnesses” and their relationship to tort law. Miracles are usually taken to mean that saints or relics cause miraculous improvements, but the tort law system causes miraculous deterioration in people. According to this law, if a person does you wrong by act, omission or negligence, and you suffer from it, you […]

Why Interstellar annoys me

*MILD SPOILER ALERT* I finally saw Interstellar last night. Good movie. But here’s a rant on why movies like it annoy me: They ignore the biggest problem facing a group of people trying to decide how to save the world—the collective action problem. For example, most people in Interstellar suffer from apparent mindlessness. Not the main characters, […]

Why smokers don’t care about punitive cigarette taxes

Over at EconLog, Scott Sumner wonders why smokers don’t seem to have the lobbying clout of other special interest groups. Considering the number of smokers in the U.S. remains in the tens of millions, you’d think we’d hear more complaining about the sky-high taxes on cigarettes that exist in several states (he notes that one […]

Public choice is arrogant

I’m reading through Randy Simmons’ Beyond Politics: The Roots of Government Failure for my Microeconomics class. You could call it a primer on public choice. I’m skeptical of public choice. Most public choice literature I’ve read makes big assumptions about the nature and strength of people’s incentives—a logical jump I’ve written about before. Much to my surprise, […]

QE over? Brace for inflation.

Lots of people began worrying about inflation when the Federal Reserve began QE back in 2008. Some even predicted “inflationary disaster,” warning that the monetary base cannot quintuple without a correlating rise in consumer prices. For a while, I believed these guys. I was an undergraduate economics student at the time, and their logic made […]

Economics + institutions + pirates

I’m writing an essay on institutional analysis and whether it helps us understand problems of economic non-development. Specifically, I’m responding to the implicit claim that institutional analysis is an improvement from the “neoclassical paradigm” that often neglects, or takes for granted, the role of institutions. It’s a little heady, I know. What I want to point out […]

Another quibble with incentive talk

Matt McCaffrey has an interesting post on incentives over at the Mises Economics Blog. He writes: Nevertheless, emphasizing incentives too much glosses over several problems: economic laws can make incentives irrelevant; incentives are in any case too narrow a concept to be the defining characteristic of economics; focus on incentives sometimes leads to a paternalistic view […]

Why “incentive talk” rubs me the wrong way

I had my first graduate microeconomics class today. One thing the professor posited as a “guidepost” for economic thinking is that incentives matter. As an example, he used welfare. If the state guarantees a certain level of income in an effort to reduce poverty, some people will respond by quitting their job and free-riding off state welfare programs. […]