Many climate change sceptics argue that the IPCC’s predictions are highly uncertain. Over at Vox, Paul Klemperer suggests that this should make us more worried, rather than reassuring us. …[If] the models merely underestimated the uncertainty, the range of plausible outcomes is now greater, so… defences would need to be higher for us to feel […]
Brad Delong points to a great article by Paul Graham about arguing on the internet: Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing… The result is there’s a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn’t mean people are […]
Tyler Cowen reports that the signalling model of education is dead! Apparently new research indicates that the value of the signal accounts for no more than 28% of the cost of education. It only takes a couple of months for an employer to learn your productivity, so how can it take years of education to […]
Lots of people are ripping in to Monica Prasad after her op-ed in the NYT on carbon taxes. She says that Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have had carbon taxes in place since the 1990s, but the tax has not led to large declines in emissions in most of these countries… [T]he insight they provide […]
I read recently about the Vélib’ program that Paris is running and what a boon it is for the environment. Apparently Ken Livingstone is keen on making London more bicycle friendly, and cities like Copenhagen are already full of cyclists. The decrease in pollution as a result of the reduction in cars must be quite […]
A couple of weeks ago I asked why people might avoid finding out how worthy a charity is. People know that they’ll give to worthy charities and yet they shy away from finding out that a charity is worthy so that they avoid giving. Why might this be? There aren’t many situations in which rational […]