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Category Archives: Our Economic World
Adverse Selection: Produce Aisle Edition
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 [...]
Also posted in Health Care Tagged adverse selection, health insurance legislation, insurance mandate 1 Comment
Producers Don’t Like Competition
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 [...]
Am I Forgetting Anything Important?
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
iPads, Blogs and Answers
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 [...]
Pareto Efficiency: Rides Home Edition
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 [...]
Tyler Cowen at His Best