Lynne Kiesling OK, so I’m listening to WOXY in my office, and they’re playing this cool hip-hoppy/rappy/soulful Handsome Boy Modeling School song called “The Truth”, and the male vocalist actually just used the phrase ceteris paribus. And used it pretty correctly, in the context of a song lyric … pretty funny!
Lynne Kiesling Today the Supreme Court hears the oral arguments in the Kelo vs. New London eminent domain case. Bill Steigerwald’s column in today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is an interview with Scott Bullock, the Institute for Justice attorney who will be making the argument for the landowner. Bullock will try to persuade the high court to …
Eminent Domain For Commercial Development: Scotus Hears About It Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Tech Central Station has an article today on tax policy in New Zealand from Veronique de Rugy. She describes the background of the changes to the tax code in the 1980s, and how New Zealand has experienced economic growth as a consequence. Tax policy is not the only area in which New Zealand …
Lynne Kiesling Leave it to Will Wilkinson to put the point so clearly and succinctly: institutions are capital. They are capital with a very strong interaction with other inputs. One of Will’s commenters argues that institutions cannot be owned and are therefore not capital. I disagree. We have lots of examples of things we consider …
Michael Giberson We here at The Knowledge Problem don’t do much meta-blogging, which may make us sort of an outlier in the blogging world. But a lot of the blogging about blogging just isn’t that interesting, and, speaking now just for myself, I don’t know that I could do any better. However, there are some …
Lynne Kiesling With thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the mention on Sunday, I second his links to two recent Wired articles. One from September 2004 looks at the proposed development of several new pebble-bed nuclear plants in China over the next 20 years. Pebble-bed is an 80-year-old technology; in this post from September 2004 (in …
Michael Giberson What?s the difference between deodorants and antiperspirants, that makes antiperspirants regulated by the FDA as an over-the-counter drug, while deodorants are not? That is just one of the questions answered in Cindy Skrzycki?s ?The Regulators? column in this morning?s Washington Post: ?Antiperspirant Makers Sweat Out FDA’s Data Request.? Skrzycki?s weekly column provides an …
Deodorants And Antiperspirants: A Regulator?s Viewpoint Read More »
Lynne Kiesling If Splenda is made from sugar, won’t the sugar industry continue to benefit from sales of it because they are providing the crucial input? Clearly they are unlikely to get paid as much per pound for sugar as an input as at retail, so in order for their profits to stay up Splenda’s …
Lynne Kiesling Doug Bandow wrote a nice column on the sugar industry’s attack on Splenda last week: You can never get enough from consumers and taxpayers. That apparently is the sugar industry’s motto. Collect subsidies. Ban trade. Outlaw your competitors. Let the American people pay. I could go on for days about the deep and …
Lynne Kiesling Institutional change is a slow process, rife with inertia, rent seeking, status quo bias, and transaction costs. Ray Gifford commented yesterday on an illustration of inertia: the persistence of “face value” on concert tickets. Ray tells of dissatisfaction with U2’s fan club pre-sale of concert tickets, wonders why tickets still even have “face …
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