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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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