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Public Goods
A Category Archive (38 entries)
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May 19, 2013
Cost-benefit Analysis
Bryan Caplan
Suppose a city's population exogenously rises. You might think that price theory clearly implies that demand for real estate will rise. But that's not so. In theory, higher population could generate a congestion externality so awful that demand for real... MORE
April 7, 2013
Alternative Economics
Art Carden
I can't wait for Bryan's The Case Against Education: every semester, my beliefs move in favor of the signaling model and against the human capital model of schooling. This isn't to say there aren't a lot of students who are... MORE
February 15, 2013
Public Goods
Garett Jones
The Wall Street Journal's Mary Kissel tweets: Blocking Hagel sets a bad precedent & lets Obama label the GOP obstructionist. And what happens when the Rs take back the White House?[More on the Hagel non-filibuster here]Do precedents matter? Does my behavior... MORE
November 26, 2012
Public Goods
David Henderson
John C. Goodman has an insightful and relatively short post this morning making the case for voting even when you're virtually positive that doing so won't change the outcome of an election. It reminded me of something I wrote in... MORE
September 30, 2012
On Facebook, John Strong asks me:Bryan, earlier this year you offered some arguments against a Georgist land tax and expressed bewilderment that tax economists don't seem to notice the obviously preferable alternative of Pigouvian taxes on negative externalities. You wrote:... MORE
September 4, 2012
Behavioral Economics and Rationality
Bryan Caplan
Imagine a world where no one ever voluntarily buys good X. Still, everyone affirms that X is very important, a vital good. If you hold an election, the population unanimously votes in favor of very generous funding for X.Most economists... MORE
June 20, 2012
Public Choice Theory
David Henderson
"If this country is worth saving, it's worth saving at a profit." --H.L. Hunt This is a quote from one of the best books of the 1970s, The Machinery of Freedom, by David Friedman. It comes at the end of... MORE
May 7, 2012
Public Goods
David Henderson
The usual argument for government intervention, aside from the paternalist and the distribution arguments, is some kind of "market failure," either in the area of public goods or in the area of externalities. When economists want to make a case... MORE
December 21, 2011
Public Goods
David Henderson
In a comment on co-blogger Bryan Caplan's recent post, economist Yoram Bauman writes: If you're looking for another post topic, you could try to mediate between me and Steve Landsburg. (I've given up on him for now :) I thought... MORE
October 27, 2010
Family Economics
Bryan Caplan
The Kauffman Foundation's Tim Kane generously included one of my questions on the latest quarterly econ blogger's survey:The net externality of the birth of an additional child in the United States is... [POSITIVE, ZERO, or NEGATIVE]Survey says: I suspect that... MORE
October 7, 2010
Microeconomics
Arnold Kling
Surely, someone has done this? I assume that fire-fighting is an industry with declining average costs. Suppose that it takes $1 million in fixed costs per year to maintain the fire department (that includes normal profit, aka opportunity cost), the... MORE
September 6, 2010
Public Goods
David Henderson
Our analysis suggests not that gangs cause violence, but that violence causes gangs. In other words, gangs form in response to government's failure to protect youths against violence. The surprising implication of our insight is that efforts to reduce gang... MORE
September 2, 2010
Public Goods
Arnold Kling
Pete Peterson writes, the Los Angeles City Council is expected to overturn the 36-year-old policy of city-funded sidewalk repair, returning responsibility to property owners. The city is attempting to narrow a nearly half-billion-dollar budget gap. The sidewalk repair program costs... MORE
July 13, 2010
Public Goods
David Henderson
Like co-blogger Arnold, I enjoyed reading the discussion among Brink Lindsey, Jonah Goldberg, and Matt Kibbe about the Tea Party Movement and whom libertarians should ally with. All three made good points but none of the three addressed a key... MORE
February 3, 2010
Public Goods
David Henderson
Co-blogger Bryan posted on one part of Scott Sumner's recent post on non-blog blogging. I find other parts of Sumner's post way more interesting. For example: Now my biggest problem is time--I spend 6 to 10 hours a day on... MORE
February 2, 2010
Economic Philosophy
Bryan Caplan
Ayn Rand's newsletters used to end with a "Horror File" of monstrous but true quotations. I thought about the Horror File when Ron Bailey's Liberation Biology quoted Frank Fukuyama:Life extension seems to me a perfect example of something that is... MORE
July 17, 2009
Economic Education
David Henderson
Econlog is in the top 25 economics blogs, as chosen by the Wall Street Journal. I've waited for my co-bloggers to crow about this, since I'm the newcomer (I started in October 2008), but because they haven't, I will. Of... MORE
May 15, 2009
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
Here's a spot-on response from my Ph.D. Micro final.The Question: True, False, and Explain: In signaling models, selfish agents might voluntarily supply public goods. The Answer:True. Yes, if donating to charities, giving blood, or sponsoring militia units or adopting part... MORE
April 10, 2009
Public Goods
David Henderson
David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom is one of my favorite all-time books making the case for freedom. I like it on at least four grounds: (1) it's tightly written, which reflects David's tight thinking, (2) it shows a great... MORE
April 2, 2009
Public Goods
David Henderson
My wife and I were cleaning out a closet last weekend and came across some of our daughter Karen's writing from elementary school. This is a letter that she wrote to President Clinton on May 26, 1994. She was nine... MORE
December 17, 2008
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
National defense, for instance, benefits the special interests that President Eisenhower identified as the military-industrial complex, and governments therefore tend to provide too much of it. Whether the U.S. government specifically does so is controversial, but we can know with... MORE
August 27, 2008
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Arnold Kling
Bruno S. Frey and Reiner Eichenberger write, externalities are not technologically but rather socially determined. There are no inherent properties of a good or service producing external effects, therefore, citizens have to use the political process to determine what is... MORE
February 10, 2008
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
When Princeton's Roland Benabou visited GMU a couple weeks ago, he made an argument I've occasionally heard before: Non-economists would disagree with economists less, and respect our views more, if we put more emphasis on the concept of externalities. When... MORE
December 15, 2007
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
Stephen Smith makes an argument that seems popular across a wide swath of the political spectrum:Yeah, and how many billion dollars per year does the United States need to spend even on just the military to make this oil available?... MORE
November 22, 2007
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
Philosopher Michael Sandel asked Greg Mankiw whether people should be allowed to sell their votes. Mankiw's answer:[T]he standard argument for unfettered voluntary exchange does not apply because there are externalities. That is, when one person sells his vote to another,... MORE
March 7, 2007
Public Goods
Arnold Kling
Tim Noah writes, Suppose the national defense of the United States were relegated to the private sector. Instead of the publicly funded Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, the country would be defended by private militias funded mainly by insurance... MORE
September 27, 2006
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
I've been sick for almost three weeks now, and it's not fun. I make an effort not to infect the people around me, but unfortunately conventional etiquette gets in the way. You're supposed to shake people's hands, right? My proposed... MORE
August 29, 2006
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
Years ago I signed an online petition urging Fox to release The Tick (the animated series) on DVD. Today I've got the DVD in my hand. Spoon! Who says economists won't help produce public goods? To be honest, I doubt... MORE
August 6, 2006
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
When he launched his first blog, Jeff Miron was explicit about his motivation: In this blog I provide a libertarian perspective on economic and social policy. By libertarian, I mean consequential libertarian, not philosophical libertarian. Thus, my arguments are based... MORE
June 11, 2006
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom... MORE
February 17, 2006
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
Think firemen provide a public good? At least in rural areas, think again: MINNEAPOLIS – Carl Berg failed to pay a $25 annual fee for rural fire protection and, as a result, firefighters let his house burn to the ground... MORE
August 16, 2005
Public Goods
Arnold Kling
Subir Gokarn observes, I've often been asked for my opinion on what the country's sunrise sectors are. My response, at first tongue-in-cheek, but becoming more and more serious over the years, is that anybody who decides to compete against the... MORE
July 26, 2005
Public Goods
Bryan Caplan
Sunday I declared war on a pair of yellow jacket nests at the base of my house, and it got me thinking. According to conventional wisdom, when I use an anti-yellow jacket spray, I impose a negative externality on other... MORE
December 14, 2004
Public Goods
Arnold Kling
Chris Dillow writes, I’ve got an idea that would revolutionize the way we do our weekly shopping. Every few years, we all vote for our favourite supermarket company. The one that gets more votes across the country than any other... MORE
September 22, 2004
Energy, Environment, Resources
Arnold Kling
Joe Katzman has a long, thoughtful post on the economics of common resources, notably water. Perhaps it's also time to factor these eco-services into a variant of GNP, so their depletion and restoration would both show on a national balance... MORE
August 16, 2004
Public Goods
Arnold Kling
Peter Gordon reports on declining use of mass transit. As a group, the 20 largest U.S. metro areas declined in transit use (all trip purposes; thank you, Wendell Cox) in the 1990s. Not relative decline but absolute decline. As a... MORE
April 16, 2004
Public Goods
Arnold Kling
My latest essay is on these topics. There are three layers to the argument against paternalism. The first layer is purely libertarian, which says that government compulsion of individuals is always wrong. The second layer is utilitarian, which says that,... MORE
January 16, 2004
Public Goods
Arnold Kling
In an essay on telecommunications pricing, Andrew Odlyzko spends some time reviewing the controversy about whether a lighthouse is necessarily a public good. As an example, a recent commentary [68] claimed that Coase had shown that "[i]nstead of the government-sanctioned... MORE
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