As if they were inspired by yesterday’s post – some civil servants from Housing New Zealand dropped this train of thought: The submission said listing housing projects as nationally significant would help prevent the delays and extra costs caused by objections from neighbours – “a situation commonly referred to as NIMBY [not in my backyard] […]
Earlier we discussed a negative OCR as a way to push us towards the “zero bound” on interest rates. But Greg Mankiw has brought up an interesting point – what happens if we want negative interest rates? Mankiw admits that we could have a lottery scheme where some currency gets knocked out of circulation randomly […]
From the excellent Overcoming bias blog (ht Offsetting Behaviour): This is a great test case for paternalists; if you feel that your superior minds justify ruling the lives of others, would do you accept having your life ruled by future folk with greatly enhanced minds? To all those civil servants who tell me we should […]
In a sign of the times, the government in the United Kingdom is talking about increasing the top tax rate from 40% to 50% to fund part of their burgeoning budget deficit. A few points about this they may have forgotten: High income earners are likely to be more responsive to an increase in tax […]
In my mind there is a simple distinction between the broad brush strokes of libertarianism, the underpinning beliefs of economics, and statism as statements for the scope of government. It goes like this: Libertarian: Market prices are a good allocation mechanism – therefore market prices make sense. Initial endowment of resources is fair – therefore […]
A recent study suggested that the idea of beer goggles did not exist. The study stated that men who had been drinking actually rated women lower than men who had not been drinking – the author went from this empirical “fact” to a claim that the idea of beer goggles is false. Now even if […]