My wife and I are extremely keen cooks and love to entertain. Presently we’ve been having numerous friends over prior to Baby Boot’s arrival and of course the challenge is to keep it interesting and varied.
So, Friday night we had halibut bourgignon. An odd dish you might think, and our french fishmonger certainly thought so, […]
The Times reported last week how the Education Select Committee criticised Gordon Brown for pledging to raise the level of spending on state school students to match that of students in private schools.
The story makes the very valid point that whimsical spending that fails to realise results will make the public unwilling to fund future […]
The news today that AstraZeneca failed to meet phase III trials for its stroke drug NXY-059 has prompted Tim Worstall to ask opponents of drug patents
If AstraZeneca is not allowed to make fat profits from those drugs that do work, do get through phase III trials, where is that money going to come from? Without […]
Bryan Caplan has written a thought provoking paper building on Thomas Szasz’s work to argue that most mental illness can be seen as unusual preferences rather than having a medical or pathological basis. We should not, he says, be surprised by unusual prefernces given the enormous variety of tastes out there.
I am preparing a co-authored […]
Will Wilkinson criticises the happiness movement.
Crucially, there is no limit to the possible forms of excellence. So, while the number of positions on any single dimension of status may be fixed, there is no reason why dimensions of status cannot be multiplied indefinitely. It does not in fact require a violation of mathematical law to […]
I’m not sure if I’m in. I don’t have a problem with the first two requirements, but to say that motivations and intentions are irrelevant is a bit too far for me.
This is equivalent to saying any choice from a menu need only be internally consistent; because motivations and the like are external to the […]
There’s not much I’d disagree with generally here, but I don’t understand the point about rebuilding the manufacturing base via investment in alternative energy sources. My problem is that the policy aim can become confused if stated like this. What’s the real aim? Rebuilding manufacturing in the US or reducing carbon emissions? If it’s the […]
I’m often struck by how our purchasing behaviour appears inefficient. There are many instances where we appear to either mispredict the utility we would derive from a product, or are apparently attributing a high option value to owning the product. These two interpretations can broadly be seen as behaviourist or rational.
Take car ownership. I’ve often […]
A few weeks ago, my wife and I visited a nursery for our expected child. It’s one of several in the area but the only one with opening times that are conducive to both mine and my wife’s working hours.
We are keen to get Baby Boot in there but were told that in order to […]
The Nobel Peace Prize was won by Muhammed Yunus of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The Bank pioneered the use of microcredit. Amazingly, the story in the Times reports that 96% of the borrowers are women and 98% of the money is repaid.
In a Stiglitz-Weiss model, a higher interest rate increases the average riskiness of projects, […]
This morning the Today programme had a short news item about the sort of questions asked by Oxbridge Dons to potential students. My favourite was the following:
“Every person alive today has a molecule of Caesar’s last breath in them, true or false”.
It’s just a beautiful way of putting a scientific question and also inspires thoughts […]
Will the UK’s antitrust authority, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) achieve more success by reducing its caseload by up to 40%?
I’m not sure. Firstly, the OFT has stated in the recent past that it intends to pursue the most damaging antitrust cases - cartels, such as the current investigation into BA’s fuel surcharges. Indeed, […]
The BBC reports that Google’s acquisition of You Tube may not be the advertising bonanza they expected.
Should Google lose a major YouTube court case and its share price suffers as a result, the company will have to brace itself not just for a deluge of lawsuits from copyright owners but disappointed shareholders as well. No […]
Some years ago I came up with the idea of writing a frivolous book applying economic theory to analyse religions. Of course, work commitments intruded but I thought I’d share some of the ideas.
Are there increasing returns to religious affiliation?
To the extent that an individual will place a higher value on a larger network than […]
Goes to Edmund Phelps. Here is a typically thoughtful analysis of tax rates and labour participation, in an article that warns of the dangers of economists pursuing ideas incompletely and without sufficient evidence.
His name didn’t appear on most lists. What does that tell about the reliability of economists’ predictions?
And how quick on the ball was […]
I read in this morning’s Metro (yes, I admit it) that Boris Johnson is proposing that students be given cash incentives by universities to learn. This, he suggests, would encourage greater efforts on behalf of the students, and also limit the grade inflation in universities (because presumably, they would not want to pay out too […]
Mark Thoma invites us to consider whether the it is right that wealth, as a result of genetic factors or luck should be taxed. There are two key issue in the Economist excerpt quoted. Firstly, that the creation of a talent based meritocracy is creating a divide between the talented elite and the rest, because […]
The debate on the veil continues in England. As a libertarian, I cannot endorse the popularly held view that people should be made to dress one way or another, even if it means covering their entire faces and draping their bodies in a shapeless chador. Is it fair, then for Jack Straw to ask Muslim […]
Francisca Kellet writes in the Daily Telegraph about Venice’s proposal to introduce a tourist tax. Given the enormous year-round overcrowding in Venice, I have a better solution: introduce an entry fee to stay on the lagoon. After all, is Venice any different from Disneyland? Like Disneyland, it’s an enclosed space with a range of accomodation […]
From the BPS Research Digest
The researchers found that compared with non-fathers, there was a marked increase in the connective branching between brain cells in the front of the marmoset fathers’ brains. Kozorovitskiy told The Digest that this could lead to enhanced information processing, thus promoting paternal behaviour. “Paternal behaviour in marmosets is a complex task, […]
