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How feasible is a ‘charter city of refugees’ in Australia?
In the second half of the 20th century, Singapore used the right institutions to go through economic development faster than any city in history before it - despite being home to varied racial and...
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Immigrants don’t steal your jobs any more than your own children do
Reviewing the literature on the impact of immigrants on the economy, I’ve been impressed by the unanimity on the empirical question of whether immigrants increase unemployment or reduce wages in the...
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Bargain hunting in the college dating market
Why don't more men join this table? The New York Times looks at the college dating market and finds men get a great deal when outnumbered by women: North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60...
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Growth more important than unions in the long run
How much does it matter whether we have labour unions or not? In the popular imagination labour unions are a significant factor in the incomes of ordinary people and a major reason we don’t endure the...
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Grow out of it!
Yesterday I wrote about how exponential economic growth has a much larger impact on employee welfare than unions can hope to. Well low wages isn’t the only problem economic growth can solve! Economist...
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Let my people grow
Greg Clark in A Farewell to Alms: “The focus on material conditions in this history will strike some as too narrow, too incidental to vast social changes over the millennia. Surely our material riches...
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Should singularitarians be socialists?
In the marketplace, factors of production (usually grouped into labour, capital and land/natural resources) are paid what is called their ‘marginal product’ (the extra output derived from the last unit...
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Are unions inconsequential even in the short run?
A while ago I wrote that while unions could increase the wages of workers in the short run, the wage growth we have seen over the last two centuries and will probably continue to see for the...
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Were you against apartheid?
Food for thought from Let Their People Come (page 79): There is a story that while perhaps apocryphal is nonetheless instructive. During its waning days, the international condemnation of South...
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The internet is displacing brands
“The boom in information for consumers has also severely weakened middle-market firms. In the past, these companies were able to charge a premium price because their brands were taken as signals of...
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Being rich, free and secure a recipe for well-being
If, like me, you suspected expanding the average person’s positive freedom was a good way to make their lives more enjoyable and satisfying, the evidence seems to be coming down our your side. Are we...
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Does virtual filth set an example or provide a substitute?
It is common to worry that depictions of bad things have a negative impact on human behaviour. Violent movies and video games are turning young children into killers! Smutty advertising is normalising...
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Should I get a flu vaccination?
My university is kind enough to offer subsidised flu jabs for $AUS20. But is it socially efficient for me as a healthy adult to get a flu jab? I thought I’d take a look at what Google Scholar said:...
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Does open trade make us more vulnerable to disasters?
In general as a production process gets more complex and requires many specialised and non-substitutable inputs, it is more vulnerable to disruption. This is proposed as a cause of collapse for many...
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Get complex, get rich, get robust
At least the Japanese can video conference when their bullet trains break In my last post I discussed the short and medium run effects of increased trade and specialization on a society’s robustness....
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Why present the gender ‘pay gap’ as a moral issue rather than a profit...
TLDR: It is commonly alleged that there is a persistent gender pay gap which is unjustified by the productivity of male and female employees. If this is true, businesses should be able to make lots of...
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Why shouldn’t we ration things with queues?
When resources are scarce they must be rationed somehow. Most frequently today resources are rationed by price. But some services, most noticeably subsidised public services like healthcare and (at my...
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Why can’t I invest in poor children?
Nicholas Kristof reports on one of the reasons many poor people stay poor: It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes,...
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Eat cows to save mice? Hold your horses!
This article from The Conversation, which quickly went viral around the world, argues that those concerned with animal welfare would do better to eat grass-fed beef than bread, because by doing so...
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Are the most important things in life free?
If there’s one thing an economist loves to spot, it is a trade-off. A trade-off puts us on familiar terrain and let’s us feel (not for the first time) that undergraduate microeconomics can make order...
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DIY recession insurance
Between 2000 and today Australia saw its ‘terms of trade’ nearly double. That is to say, the things Australians buy from overseas have halved in price relative to the things we sell. The key reasons...
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Why stories celebrate conflict rather than compromise
I wrote this for the Alternative Law Journal some time ago: As I was watching the film Avatar and the cinemagoers around me were cheering on the Na’vi heroes in their fight against human invaders, I...
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HECS a distraction from the real issues
I wrote this in April 2011 for the ANU student newspaper. Those without an interest in Australian education policy can safely ignore it. Opinions expressed are mine alone. Last week’s National Union of...
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Why doesn’t everyone use matching donations?
For the last two years whenever I have felt charitable, rather than directly give away the money – to VillageReach incidentlaly – I have offered to match donations made by my Facebook friends 1:1....
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Education is not a zero sum game
Recently the Australian Government produced a large report into its school funding arrangements. William Isdale over at Oxford’s Practical Ethics blog has examined the review and argued that it...
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The case for working on an AI singularity even if it is improbable
For those concerned about the future there are a lot of things to worry about. Nuclear war, bioterrorism, asteroids, artificial intelligence, runaway climate change – the list goes on. All of these...
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Why local food is not effective altruism
I’m going to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on ‘local food’ and then later ‘fair trade’ to explain why I don’t think they are worth putting much effort into. I hope it will inspire you to do...
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Education is not a zero-sum game part 2
Here I will unpack another common offered but dubious part of William Isdale’s argument that permitting families to spend extra on their children’s education is inefficient and immoral. Isdale asks us...
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The principle of ‘altruistic arbitrage’
There is a principle in finance that obvious and guaranteed ways to make a lot of money, so called ‘arbitrages’, should not exist. It has a simple rationale. If market prices made it possible to trade...
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Good relative to what?
People often say to me that certain actions, outcomes or policies are ‘good’. Something I usually try to establish right away is ‘compared to what?’ There are three common responses: relative to...
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Cowen and Singer on the marginal impact of eating a fish
jkaufman over at LessWrong has been good enough to post a transcript of an interview between Tyler Cowen and Peter Singer on ethics. It had a big influence on my thinking when I first heard it several...
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Are flow-on effects key to health interventions?
Last year I gave a few thousand dollars to the charity Village Reach, which performs vaccinations in rural Mozambique, on the recommendation of charity evaluator GiveWell. The bottom line of the...
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Should you floss? A cost-benefit analysis
If you are like most people I know, you don’t feel you floss enough. Each time you go to the dentist you get scolded for not flossing at least once a day. You promise to be a good patient but after a...
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Tilting at Zombies
Last year I published a mostly positive review of John Quiggin’s Zombie Economics in Policy magazine, which I never got around to cross posting here. Here it is: In a recent, noisy debate between...
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Is a life of poverty better than no life at all?
This is a question I repeatedly find myself asking especially in evaluating the desirability of Hanson’s Malthusian upload scenario, or increasing the number of wild animals. Here’s one piece of...
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The non-existent ‘lump of relationship’ fallacy
A very common mistake people commit when thinking about economics and the labour market is the ‘lump of labour’ or ‘lump of jobs‘ fallacy. It crops up in ideas like these: “We should cut immigration to...
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Reasons to worry about Australia’s terms of trade boom and ways to hedge
From a report by Societe General which justifies my concern about Australia’s lack of insurance against a Chinese bust. You may like to read the whole thing. “Mine production is being ramped up to...
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The flow on effects of eating meat
An academic has backed up my guess from a few months back that meat eating must result in more rodent deaths from plant agriculture than eating plants directly. His article makes such similar points I...
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Invest now, give later?
The power of exponential growth seems to make a compelling case for effective altruists to delay their donations. An average 5% return on investment (ROI) would turn one dollar into ten in 50 years...
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Don’t waste time to save money
For many years during my undergraduate degree I was living on a scholarship alone and so learned to be a very frugal person. As computers and mobile phones got cheaper, I would always take advantage of...
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What I’m listening to
Here are the podcasts I’m tracking at the moment, with a link to a notable recent episode. EconTalk – Lengthy interviews with experts on economics and social science. e.g. Acemoglu on Why Nations Fail...
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Is the future communist?
A common folk explanation for the triumph of capitalism over communism goes along these lines: Communism has some lovely notions about sharing wealth between people in proportion to their needs and...
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Colliders confounding causality
I had noticed the ‘collider’ sampling bias before but never thought about how common it must be: Sampling error? Omitted variable bias? Bah, that’s for first-year grad students. What I find really...
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The negligible returns to cash
In Australia the best term deposit rate I can find is 5.5%. This is a lot higher than you would be getting on US dollars (~0%) or the Euro (~2%) at the moment. With an inflation rate of 2.5% that looks...
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A better way of feeding the world than torturing chickens
John Quiggin suggests that we could feed everyone a high-meat diet and reduce climate change to boot by shifting from livestock to chickens: I’ve previously argued that we can feed the world if we make...
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A colossal counterfactual screw up
A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of choosing the right counterfactual in policy analysis. I noted that quite often people choose ‘no change’ as their comparison for whatever they are...
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Trading on prediction markets
Last week I placed my first bets on the prediction market InTrade – the largest and most notable prediction market in the world. They were on behalf of a friend but I will soon start trading with my...
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Down with housework
A few months ago I wrote about how cleanliness was often an unhelpful addiction: I am skeptical of cleaning, beyond that required to stay organised and avoid disease, for the same reason most people...
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What is to be done about animals?
Humans have successfully developed laws and social institutions that allow us to gradually improve our welfare over time. These include wealth redistribution among families, close friends and countries...
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Do innovation programs actually increase innovation?
I wrote this a few years ago privately, and now that I am no longer employed by the Australian Government, can post it up here. I’m doing so both because it’s interesting in itself, and because I may...
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