Sometimes, when you read a whole lot of polemic, you end up thinking in black and white terms. It’s nice sometimes to be reminded that ideological conflicts are not as black and white as many combatants would like to paint them. Here on this blog we like to talk about government intervention in markets. Arnold […]
There’s a showdown at Overcoming Bias between Eliezer and Robin over discount rates. Eliezer says, I’ve never been a fan of the notion that we should (normatively) have a discount rate in our pure preferences – as opposed to a pseudo-discount rate arising from monetary inflation, or from opportunity costs of other investments… If you […]
Steven Landsburg has an opinion piece in the NY Times today in which he extols the benefits of free trade and rails against the protectionists: Suppose, after years of buying shampoo at your local pharmacy, you discover you can order the same shampoo for less money on the Web. Do you have an obligation to […]
I’m always told about how bean-counters everywhere like to cut costs, but every now and then something slips through the net. Apparently Japanese researchers are developing a paper airplane to fly from the International Space Station to Earth! As much fun as that sounds, I am baffled as to how they got funding.
Matt observes that some crimes are not worth reporting, and it is probably sub-optimal for the police to do anything about them if they are reported. The flipside of that is the cost to society of criminalising behaviour and then refusing to enforce the rules. Sudhir Venkatesh and Steven Levitt’s new paper on prostitution in […]
Dwindling natural resources and increasing consumption are global problems that get plenty of airtime these days. So where do all the metals extracted and ‘consumed’ go? Well, apparently they end up in dumps in Japan: Despite perception of Japan being short of natural resources, “urban mines” mean the country actually possesses world-leading amounts of rare […]