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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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