We’ve talked in the past about how smokers would be better off if they could precommit to not smoking in the future. It seems that someone is trying to do just that by auctioning a contract on Trademe: I’ve smoked cigarettes for twelve years and I’ve tried all the usual ways to quit smoking. Now […]
It seems the Catholic church has moved into the 21st century with the addition of a few new, and decidedly modern, sins. The new sins on the block are: Environmental pollution; Genetic manipulation; Accumulating excessive wealth; Inflicting poverty; Drug trafficking and consumption; Morally debatable experiments; AND, Violation of fundamental rights of human nature. I don’t […]
In the comments for my post on taxing observable characteristics that are correlated with income, CPW asks what I think about Kurt Vonnegut’s tale of Harrison Bergeron. I don’t plan to venture into literary criticism which I have no expertise in, but I liked the story enough that I can’t resist posting on it!
Talking to Agnitio today, he mentioned that the result of having a top personal tax rate above the company tax rate is tax avoidance and evasion. The idea being that people with wealth will try to pipe income through businesses to avoid paying the top tax rate. Well, it seems he’s empirically justified in that […]
I was walking along the street today and, as there often are, there were charity collectors with buckets trying to get donations. Yet everyone walked past without a second glance! Why is that: are we just callous and uncaring, or is it something else?
Oliver Woods has used Matt’s post on the trade off between equity and efficiency to launch an attack on the separation between normative and positive economics. Matt’s busy with real economics today so it falls to me to defend his honour. Oliver claims that …any ‘rational’ observer would see that economics and politics/society/morality are fundamentally […]