I was impressed by the title of a NZ Herald article today “Fat is normal“. I was like, yes it is perfectly rational for an individual to put on weight, contrary to what we are often told. I began to think that if policy wonks would treat the idea of putting on weight sensibly we […]
With alcohol regulation we decided to remember that it is the external cost that matters. Now one reason private costs might matter in terms of regulation is internalities. There is a discussion of this with regards to boozing here. This brings me to the idea of “addiction” I discovered from this article. What is addiction, […]
Remember the simple fact that, as long as we believe people are responsible, have better information on themselves, and are better able to make choices regarding themselves then arbitrary regulation (or some lesser combination of these points), then we shouldn’t focus on the entire “social cost (private + external costs)” associated with alcohol when regulating. […]
In the interest of providing more timely information regarding economic information, or at least our view, the firm I work for (Infometrics) has made a Twitter page and a Facebook page. The purpose of the Twitter page is to put down our first thoughts on data, and links to articles. The purpose of the Facebook […]
Not PC has a critique of the use of mathmatics in economics. Critising the discipline of economics has been especially popular lately. I have had engineers (and some physicists) call me up to tell me that we do economics wrong and we need more maths (to which my reply would be to look more closely […]
While having a quick look of “Failbook” I found this enlightening status update: Source. This is one of the reasons why taxing on the basis of a “family” unit instead of an “individual” unit doesn’t make sense to me. By setting up an arbitrary idea of what a family is you ensure that people arrange […]