Both Tyler Cowen and Andrew Sullivan have turned on the attack against the “dating game”, specifically the “neg“.
Now any attack on moral grounds could be justifiable (as could any defence), it is just about personal value judgments. But both authours mention that they see the neg as a suboptimal strategy. On these theoretical grounds I do not think they are quite right.
The Standard mentions the writings of Richard Epstein on racial discrimination and says:
A charitable reading of Epstein’s work is that he believes employment law stopping employers from putting “No Blacks or Jews” on their situations vacant ads is ineffective and counter-productive. Instead, we should allow employers to openly discriminate against people on the basis of race, age and sex because the free market will punish them for their irrational choices.
It’s a very interesting topic on which I’m no expert, so I shan’t wade into the debate on affirmative action. However, the latter sentence quoted just makes no sense from an economic perspective. Read more
In a recent post, Paul Walker criticises the idea that “deadweight loss wouldn’t exist if we had a government monopoly”. He is right but in another idealistic sense the idea of no dead-weight loss is also correct right.
If the government acts as a monopoly we will still have dead weight loss, as it comes from the “loss of surplus” relative to the situation where “surplus” is as large as possible (given demand and the monopolies cost structure).
But if government blatantly sets price equal to the marginal cost of the last unit dead weight loss will melt away. This does not imply that profit is dead weight loss in any sense of the word, and it does not tell us that the solution will be “dynamically efficient” (where is the incentive to invest, to develop), but it does tell us that a government that is behaving this way could achieve the “perfectly competitive” price and quantity.
However, this is all 100 level stuff that I don’t particularly care about. My interest lies with the “debunking of microeconomics” that Steve tries to achieve on Paul Walker’s blog.
Following today’s discussion on an addiction study I have realised that I must have an addition.
For the last 2 months I have been painfully addicted to a horrendous substance – not drinking (except for this one intervention that was staged about 3 weeks ago).
It has had all the negative impacts associated with addiction:
All I know is that I’m personally concerned about this addiction, and I’ll be doing what I can to solve it tonight. Even so, can the government really trust an irrational agent like me to drink enough?
Given this I think I need some government intervention. How about the government subsidises my alcohol and the Law Commission pushes for the regulation of alcohol towards me.
Note: The only parties I’m making fun of in this post are the government, the Law Commission, and myself (for not drinking for 9 weeks) – not any of the economic analysts.
And don’t try to convince me not drinking isn’t an addiction – I seriously have been struggling to break it!
No in the title to this post I am not complaining about my lack of height. I am simply discussing the housing market 😉
The Worthwhile Canadian Initiative gives an interesting point on housing: We are all born with a short position on housing.
This has an interesting implication. Since short positions involve risk and since long positions involve risk (as rental costs/incomes are volatile), the low risk position is to own one house.
As a result, we would expect the rate of return on housing to be LOWER than other asset classes. An interesting point to keep in mind!
Following the incessant blather on the BERL report into the cost of alcohol Ganesh Nana has come out to defend the report (Hat Tip this guy).
Why bother? After all we all know that any report on costs will be filled with wild conjecture and pointlessly misrepresented by the public.
Well it turns out the Dr Nana felt the report has been too heavily misrepresented and wanted to clear some things up, so I guess that’s fine.
Except that there are two significant ways that his reply leaves me wanting: