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MattY: "I take this as saying that Hayek would support a universal health care system but would prefer it to be financed with a flat or regressive tax base."
links for 2010-02-26
27-Feb-10
links for 2010-02-25
26-Feb-10
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"The human brain is a big believer in equality—and a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, has become the first to gather the images to prove it.
Specifically, the team found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person's head, rather than the poor person's."
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"Small-government types don’t like to be accused of being uncaring or lacking empathy. But I think it’s striking how common it is to find a high-profile conservative politician who’s against federal activism for everything except some one cause that’s afflicted his or her own family. In most cases, this isn’t selfish—the Palins will be fine no matter what happens with IDEA. But she recognizes that some families with special needs kids aren’t as fortunate as she is and she empathizes and sympathizes with their plight. Other people with other problems she’s just indifferent to."
links for 2010-02-23
24-Feb-10
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"CBO estimates that in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2009, ARRA added between 1.0 million and 2.1 million to the number of workers employed in the United States, and it increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by between 1.4 million and 3.0 million. Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers. CBO also estimates that real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.5 percent to 3.5 percent higher in the fourth quarter than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA."
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Fascinating stuff as Jo'burg's new BRT system meets fury from both NIMBYists in the suburbs (who say buses will cause congestion and 'damage property values' but apparently don't mind vast numbers of cars) and, more unusually, the gangs that control the current private minibus industry:
"The city’s first challenge was to win over the formidable minibus taxi industry, which moves 14 million people daily in a nation of 49 million, far more than the bus and rail systems combined. It is perhaps the country’s greatest success story of black entrepreneurship, though with a history of ruthless violence. Experts estimate that hundreds, if not thousands, of people have died in “taxi wars” to control routes."
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Would be remarkable if it is inequality that finally undermines the Chinese state …
"The rich have got a lot richer in China during the financial crisis. This has fueled strong resentment among ordinary Chinese, who feel official nepotism and corruption is making some people extremely rich."
links for 2010-02-22
23-Feb-10
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Great news. Also note that local businesses initially opposed the pedestrianisation of Times and Herald Squares but are now overwhelmingly supportive.
links for 2010-02-21
22-Feb-10
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Robert Carson Allen:
"A Farewell to Alms advances striking claims about the economic history of the world. These include (1) the preindustrial world was in a Malthusian preventive check equilibrium, (2) living standards were unchanging and above subsistence for the last 100,000 years, (3) bad institutions were not the cause of economic backwardness, (4) successful economic growth was due to the spread of "middle class" values from the elite to the rest of society for "biological" reasons, (5) workers were the big gainers in the British Industrial Revolution, and (6) the absence of middle class values, for biological reasons, explains why most of the world is poor. The empirical support for these claims is examined, and all are questionable."
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I'd have liked a bit more discussion of why wages were higher in England, but this is good stuff. Robert Carson Allen:
"This paper uses the adoption and invention of the spinning jenny as a test case to understand why the industrial revolution occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century rather than in France or India. It is shown that wages were much higher relative to capital prices in Britain than in other countries. Calculation of the profitability of adopting the spinning jenny shows that it was profitable in Britain but not in France or in India. Since the jenny was profitable to use only in Britain, it was only in Britain that it was worth incurring the costs necessary to develop it. That is why the jenny was invented in Britain but not elsewhere. Irrespective of the quality of their institutions or the progressiveness of their cultures, neither the French nor the Indians would have found it profitable to mechanize cotton production in the eighteenth century."
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Oliver Bullough talks about his new book on the hidden history of the Caucasus. Sounds fascinating.
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Yglesias reports some findings from Kinder & Kam’s US Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion:
"if you restrict your attention to white Americans then ethnocentric views (both in terms of positive views of whites and negative views of non-whites) is correlated with hostility to means-tested welfare programs. The relationship remains statistically significant even when you control for partisanship and for self-described political beliefs regarding egalitarianism and limited government.
But if you look at views on social insurance programs—Social Security and Medicare—you get the reverse result. Ethnocentrism is associated with support for increases in Social Security and Medicare spending, again even when you control for partisanship and self-described political beliefs regarding egalitarianism and limited government. And what seems to matter here isn’t dislike for non-whites, but positive solidaristic feelings about other white people."
Back
20-Feb-10
To anyone still reading this blog, sorry for going offline for about two months there. It’s a sign of how old this blog is and how clueless I am about tech matters that it is still hosted on my friend Pat’s server, so when something goes wrong it takes one or both of us to get round to fixing it, which sometimes isn’t the biggest priority.
If you are upset at having missed my Delicious links for the last couple of months you can find them all here. Posting is likely to be light for some time yet, as I’m busy with other things, including a macroeconomics course which is doing my head in (Real Business Cycle theory? Really?).
links for 2010-02-18
19-Feb-10
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That should be a six *month* high, you dolts (specifically, James Quinn, US Business Editor) - but who's counting?
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And John Stossel is very stupid.
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Lots of evidence supportive of a large, positive effect on the economy of the Obama stimulus.
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Oh look, even the American Enterprise Institute thinks that the stimulus had a big impact.
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Not noticeably, no.