Quote of the Week: Totally Expected Consequences

Why do boys love sweets so much?  When 6-year old Joey uses his allowance to buy a Clark Bar, this raises demand for sugar.  Brazil is a major exporter of sugar so this raises wages for sugarcane farmworkers in Brazil, diverting Brazilian youth away from their next-best employment as footballers.  Because Brazil is dominant in [...]

Irony

The New York Review of Books has on archive a rather interesting short biography of Milton Friedman. It is, on the whole, well-written, and I don’t know nearly enough about the facts here to question it’s accuracy, although Tyler Cowen, who should, does express some doubts. It contains the following passage:
Milton Friedman played three roles [...]

Quote of the Week: The Law of Unintended Consequences

If you’re not careful when moving the invisible hand, it will smack you in the head.
–Gary, if that’s his name.
I find that to be a more poetic phrasing than the standard version, here.
The context is a discussion on a paper that finds that “a successful unionization vote significantly decreases the market value of the [...]

Credit Crunch: The Fairytale Version

Go here for details, but this is the full story:
Once upon a time, there was a blameless girl called Consumerella, who didn’t have enough money to buy all the lovely things she wanted. She went to her Fairy Godmother, who called a man called Rumpelstiltskin who lived on Wall Street and claimed to be able [...]

More on the Markets

Warren Buffett gives reasonable, and frankly obvious, advice. Too bad it only applies to people who have enough money saved up (and coming in) that they don’t have to worry about how to survive over the next couple of months.
Hilarious and pointed article at The Onion: the next bubble.
Bad news for the markets is good [...]

Trouble

Anyone else care that the Sensex is at 10.5 and (more importantly; we’re at the lagging end, remember?) the Dow went below 9K? (8.4 right now-drop of 2K in the last five days). Meanwhile, money markets are still frozen, and Alex Tabarrok at MR reports that people are buying home vaults. Not good.
Paul Krugman:
On [...]

“It’s the Economy, Stupid!”

And here’s PROOF!!!
From Greg Mankiw’s (Excellent) Blog

Forecasting Presidential Elections

From Statistical Modeling….

Happiness and the Political Spectrum

US Centric like most of the data anywhere on the net, but worth reading nonetheless.
Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals. Discuss. – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog
• In 2004, 44 percent of respondents who said they were “conservative” or “very conservative” said they were “very happy,” versus just 25 percent of people who [...]

Revisiting Libertarian Paternalism

Spurred on by the interest Niketh showed in the subject, I hereby present what is mainly a collection of links that anyone who cares enough to google “Libertarian Paternalism” can find. I’m just putting it here so that you can see it anyway…something that just happens to be the essence of libertarian paternalism [...]

Libertarian Paternalism

I know it sounds confusing, but give it a chance! First sighted at:
Nudge – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog
Since people don’t think very hard about the choices they make, it is a lot easier to trick them into doing what you want than to try to educate them or incentivize them [...]