Category Archives: Our Economic World

Tyler Cowen at His Best

By Charlie Deist | Published: May 22, 2010
From a post titled “The Executive Dining Room at the World Bank”: “Overall you could do worse than to eat here, which implies donor opinion is a constraint on raising WB salaries explicitly.” –Tyler Cowen
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Adverse Selection: Produce Aisle Edition

By Charlie Deist | Published: April 3, 2010
One concern of opponents of the health insurance legislation is that healthy young people will opt not to purchase government mandated health insurance, even when faced with a stiff penalty. If this were to happen, the pool of people still covered by insurance would be less healthy than a simple random sample of society. A [...]
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Producers Don’t Like Competition

By Josh Weil | Published: March 28, 2010
Especially marijuana farmers in the historic and lax enforcement region of Humboldt county. No doubt some farmers will go out of business, but legalization will result in both massive gains in consumer surplus and new farmers going into business. There is no right to a job, and it’s unfair to prevent others from entering an industry. There [...]
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Am I Forgetting Anything Important?

By Josh Weil | Published: March 14, 2010
In order to study human action within any institutional setting, a researcher needs a cursory understanding of ownership, insatiability, self-interestedness, rationality, preferences and constraints, time, uncertainty, and diminishing returns. Update: Included uncertainty
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Coasian Bargaining FAIL

By Charlie Deist | Published: March 11, 2010
I recently had the unfortunate experience of finding out that the shiny red bike I bought a few weeks ago from the Ashby Flea was stolen property. I was notified via a napkin taped to my handlebars that said that I had stolen her bike along with a request to please call “Mimi” and return it. Shucks. When I [...]
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iPads, Blogs and Answers

By Charlie Deist | Published: January 27, 2010
By the numbers, US economic performance over the past decade has not been impressive. However, there are other indicators of progress that NBER and BLS statistics do not convey. I don’t know how the Consumer Price Index currently accounts for changes to the quality of consumer electronics, but even if they could account for the vast [...]
Also posted in Innovation | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Pareto Efficiency: Rides Home Edition

By Charlie Deist | Published: December 28, 2009
Economists often speak of efficiency, which I fear might further people’s perception of economics as a calculating, dismal science, unconnected to more “human” social sciences. I think that the word “efficient” carries the negative connotation of a robot-like, profit-maximizing corporation, concerned only with the bottom line. This is an unfortunate mischaracterization, because many economic definitions [...]
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