Peopl just love to think that they’re smarter than everyone else. They look at a problem they’re not familiar with for two minutes and then say, “Oh, but the answer’s obviously…” Matt will recognise this phenomenon from all the times he’s been told that macro forecasting is a waste of time and the people buying […]
According to the Dom Post there is new research out showing that banning smoking in places that people socialise will reduce social smoking: New Zealand researchers believe fewer people would take up smoking socially if smoke-free rules extended to areas outside bars. Alone, that sounds pretty innocuous. But how does it justify a headline like: […]
From the Positive Economist: Government, whatever it is, isn’t a grumpy gatekeeper protecting a bottomless barrel of stuff and saying “no, no, no”. We can disagree about what government should do, of course, but let’s not pretend that there aren’t constraints. How many stories does this apply to in a daily newspaper?
Pareto optimality: when you can’t take someone’s shit without them giving a shit. HT: Greg Mankiw Update: Eric points to some good additions here. Particularly relevant to the libertarians among you.
An interesting piece by Robert Waldfogel on VoxEU attempts to estimate the quality of music over the past half decade. He uses a few different measures of quality and asks whether the advent of music sharing online increased or reduced quality. The key chart is: The spike in the 2000s is interesting, but in interpreting […]
Female prisoners are far more expensive, per head, than male prisoners. The Dom Post seems to think that’s a bad thing: Women behind bars are more expensive than even the most dangerous offenders in maximum security, with their daily cost to the country rising by $150 in the past five years. Only, further down the […]