Economics

  • Economics,  Politics

    Wednesday link roundup

    • An interesting post on autism and vaccines
    • This post from EconLog

      Back in 1980, State correctional facilities had 9 violent criminals for every drug offender. By 2003, that ratio was 2.6:1.

    • DOD Braces for a fight with Pelosi

      Pentagon officials are bracing for a fight with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) over her desire to allow lawmakers’ adult children to tag along on taxpayer-funded travel for free.

      Pelosi wants them to be able to fill the role of lawmakers’ spouses when the latter are unable to make a trip because of health issues or work commitments.

      The shameful part is that they can say all that with a straight face. “Fill the role of Lawmaker’s spouses”, ridiculous.

  • Economics,  Immigration

    A good post on immigration

    From Kerry Howley in Reason

    The greatest distortion for Chadian farmers is not American cotton subsidies, writes Pritchett, but that “farmers from Chad have to farm in Chad—and not farm in France, Poland, or Canada.”

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  • Books,  Economics,  Quotes

    Line of the moment

    I came across this podcast of Steven Landsburg, author of More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics and found it quite entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed his earlier works, especially The Armchair Economist (much better than Freakonomics). In the excerpt it has this bit:

    If your common sense tells you otherwise, remember that common sense also tells you the earth is flat.

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  • Abortion,  Economics,  Law

    The mother of all abortion posts

    Glen Whitman has pretty much all of the abortion analogies (all five of them) that enter the logical debate about the topic.

    It’s an odd thing. I used to debate him quite frequently on a now-defunct website, and he caused me to change my position on what the legality of early-term abortion should be with analogy number five

    The Negligent Driver. When you negligently or deliberately cause harm to another person, the law requires you to provide compensation, either with money or some kind of action. If your negligent driving puts a pedestrian in the hospital, you are liable for his medical bills. Likewise, one might argue, your sexual behavior creates the risk of placing a fetus in a very precarious situation. If so, you are liable for the fetus’s care during that time. This analogy emphasizes the responsibility of people for the risks they create, thereby dodging the previous analogy’s “no invitation” problem. The difficulty with this analogy comes from the definition of “harm.” Harm doesn’t mean being in a difficult situation – it means being in a worse situation than you would have been otherwise. Were it not for your reckless driving, the pedestrian would (in all likelihood) still be walking around, safe and sound. Were it not for the act of sex, the fetus would not exist at all. To sustain the claim that the act of sex creates a risk of harm to the fetus, you have to insist that existence in a dependent state is worse than sheer non-existence. If the act of sex constitutes a tort, it is the only tort I can think of that creates the very person it victimizes.

    I’m the only person I know of who changes his mind on abortion due to a logical argument.

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  • Adages,  Economics,  Quotes

    More wisdom from my old econ professors

    The same professor mentioned in the previous post said that it is the natural order of things for

    “Those who study the very big see the study of the very small as true, but not relevant. Those who study the very small see the study of the very big as relevant, but not true”.

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