Apparently New York is banning large soft drink cup sizes to reduce sugar consumption and obesity. Eric has used this as a launchpad for a slippery slope argument attacking libertarian paternalism (LP). The original idea of Sunstein and Thaler was that you could design choices to minimise the likelihood of bad decisions without restricting choice. […]
Chris Dillow blogs about the effect of freedom on happiness: Does freedom make us happy? Two things I’ve seen today suggest not. First, a cross-country study of the link between economic freedom and well-being concludes: “Economic freedom is significantly negatively related to life satisfaction if controlled for the influence of income per capita, unemployment, social […]
He is known for tirelessly bringing the facts to every debate and applying economic theory in the midst of heated arguments. The unknown economist works behind a veil of nerdiness, invisible to normal people going about their daily lives. Yet through his perseverance we hope that some order is brought to the world, one internet […]
From Economix.
The Dim Post has a great guest post up that demonstrates what researcher drily refer to as ‘ability bias’. I’m not going to reproduce it all here but it’s worth reading if you’re not familiar with the problem. The bit that I find really depressing about the article is this: So, after all this has […]
The recent budget reduced the number of students who are eligible for the student allowance, particularly for postgraduate students. There have since been almost daily articles in the newspapers lamenting the students’ plight. Today there is an article in which a student describes how she will have to take on extra debt to finance her […]