Tom Palmer has a paper on popular market myths (HT: Tyler Cowen) and towards the end sounds a little caution about eulogising over markets too much. I thought about that paper when I read Tim Worstall’s post on elephant poaching.
Tim suggests that decriminalising the ivory trade would lower ivory prices and thus reduce the incentives […]
Organic food can be bad for the environment. One of my first posts was about the expected rail against Tesco’s soaring profits. The relevant part of the post:
Supermarkets fly in strawberries from Africa in December, thus polluting the environment. We should stick to local and seasonal
Firstly, shops sell what we want and if you want […]
London, or rather Ken Livingstone, has struck its own deal with Hugo Chavez for cheap oil. The fuel will be priced below cost and in return for ferrying around poor people in London, Venezuela will get “assistance” with global warming strategies.
As the article points out, what on earth does Venezuela gain? It could sell its […]
The Economist blog weighs in with this:
behavioural economics can point to many interesting irregularities in behaviour, but it cannot dictate political beliefs such as the level of government intrusion into the economy. If we put the government in charge of deciding what we should want, who will be in charge of manipulating government preferences?
It’s a […]
The BBC reports of moves towards ending free banking in the UK, and charging customers for current accounts. Graham Beale, the incoming CEO of Nationwide says,
In a way, I do believe fee-based banking is a fairer proposition
We might grumble about being charged a fee to have an account, but there appears no logical reason to […]
Monty Python had a celebrated sketch in which a self-proclaimed dinosaur expert, Ann Elk, propounded her theory of Brontasuaruses When repeatedly asked by the interviewer for the details of her theory, she finally answers
All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much MUCH
thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the
far end. That is the […]
DaimlerChrysler may demerge. Back in the days when I did this kind of research, we often found that 60-70% of mergers destroyed value for the acquiring shareholders. The most typical problems were a failure to manage massive integration issues and, of course, over-paying for the acquisition. Along with over-paying, one can suggest a failure to […]
Lyn lays bare her thought processes as she writes a psychology essay. Her motivation being to demonstrate to students that even model answers don’t just spring forth from mental gloop
Don Boudreaux writes
I must be explicit that I have long been skeptical of “green.” Unlike “green” folks, I am not especially inspired by nature. Yes, often nature is pretty and soothing to visit. But to get my blood pumping with excitement and awe you must show me a cityscape — Manhattan’s skyline, […]
Steven Landsburg thinks they might be, and that’s why we don’t see many top female executives.
If his argument is to apply in the corporate world, it means that the decisions and actions of top executives really are marginal, in the same way that fighting over a match point at Wimbledon is. Of course, the really […]
Tim Worstall is surely right when he claims that Peter Hain’s call for two-thirds City bonuses to be donated to charity, is just political posturing within the Labour Party.
Let’s take it as given that no-one seriously considers this idea as a starter. After all, it is largely the workers that benefit from City largesse, […]
The former Chancellor is not convinced.
Lord Lawson told MPs: “One of the oddities of this whole field is that you apply weather forecasting to economic forecasting to demographic forecasting, you pile uncertainty on uncertainty and then apparently you come to a certain conclusion of what we should do.
But that criticism would apply to any proposal, […]
Brad Delong writes
Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer and the other millionaires and billionaires of Microsoft are brilliant, hardworking, entrepreneurial and justly wealthy. But only the first 5 percent of their wealth can be justified as an economic incentive to encourage entrepreneurship and enterprise. The next 95 percent would create much more happiness and opportunity […]
