beyond markets and states

I recently received the latest edition of the American Economic Review and it was quite the pleasure to read Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel lecture.  Ostrom’s work has helped us understand how people go about dealing with tragedy of the commons problems.  Through her work she finds that there are several examples where people are able to manage [...]

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evolution, social cost, and ideas to change the world.

Over at Org Theory, David Stark has an interesting piece on game theory and sociology that is self-recommending.  One of the interesting observations in the post in the first paragraph: Some years ago, when they were little kids, my children developed a hybrid game.They’d taken their Monopoly board over to a friend’s house.  They’d remembered to [...]

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do food stamps increase unemployment?

Many argue that welfare programs such as food stamp programs will often create additional unemployment.  Now, a new NBER paper shows empirical evidence supporting this claim. Abstract: Labor supply theory makes strong predictions about how the introduction of a social welfare program impacts work effort. Although there is a large literature on the work incentive effects [...]

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let’s be adults here

A letter I sent to the New York Times: In a New York Times editorial on May 21st titled “Limits of Libertarianism” you published, “It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market” The government abolishing Jim Crow and Slavery [...]

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Immigration reduces crime…

…or evidence of Bryan Caplan’s anti-foreign bias. Futurity.org links to a University of Colorado-Boulder study and an Arizona Republic article which seems to suggest that, at worst, immigration has led to no rise in violent crime or, at best, has actually lead a society with less violent crime.  From the UC-Boulder study: “Cities that experienced [...]

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markets facilitate cooperative behavior…

In a recent study by a couple of anthropologists, some interesting, but pretty obvious, information comes to light; A new study co-authored by University of California, Davis, anthropologist Richard McElreath and published today in Science magazine suggests that the cooperative nature of each society is at least partly dependent upon historical forces – such as [...]

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Welcome to the blog…

This is my new blog.  Kick up your feet and make yourself feel at home… and keep an eye out for trolls…

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