Michael Giberson In my view most “green jobs” arguments are bunk. While such estimates may have their practical uses, for the most part they are convenient lies. Industry lies to politicians and bureaucrats to get subsidies, and politicians recycle the lies to get votes. My view is not particularly subtle. Edward Glaeser provides a subtler …
Michael Giberson The moral intuition that undergirds price gouging laws may be described as “it is wrong to take advantage of people in distress for personal economic gain.” In states with price gouging laws, the laws are typically in force only during officially declared emergencies. This limitation – that they are enforced only during declared emergencies …
Please State the Nature of the Economic Emergency: a Note on Price Gouging Laws Read More »
Michael Giberson Cornucopian views on resources are back in the news a bit due to John Tierney’s column at the New York Times in which he reports the settling of a wager on oil prices entered into in 2005 with oil industry analyst/peak oil proponent Matt Simmons. In brief, Simmons bet Tierney oil prices would …
Julian Simon and John Tierney Were Just Lucky, He Guesses Read More »
Michael Giberson Interview with Ronald Coase, on the occasion of the establishment of the Coase China Society, an effort to stimulate study and application of Coase’s ideas in China. Interview conducted by Wang Ning, a student of Coase’s now teaching at Arizona State University and co-author with Coase of the book How China Became Capitalist. …
Michael Giberson For more economists caught in the act of navel gazing, check out The Economist‘s forum on the question of whether economists need a professional code of ethics. If you want some background, the urge for a code of ethics came about something like this: Since the end of 2008, economists have been professionally embarrassed by …
Michael Giberson David Warsh, at Economic Principals, sees signs of a revival of interest in the history of economic thought emerge from the recent meetings of the American Economic Association in Denver.
Michael Giberson Following up yesterday’s note on randomized testing in free legal aid, here is another kind of applied experimental work: The recently ended Wikipedia fundraising campaign made extensive use of randomized testing to explore just which appeals generated the most revenue. “If everyone reading this donated $5” vs. “If everyone reading this donated $10” …
Randomized Testing for Online Fundraising Appeals Read More »
Michael Giberson Learning from randomized controlled experiments: apparently free legal representation provided by the Harvard Legal Aide Bureau tended to delay (by about two weeks on average) receipt of unemployment benefits among a group of claimants appealing an initial disallowance of their unemployment claims. Representation had no effect on the likelihood of a claimant succeeding …
Michael Giberson The world has plenty of empire builders, but Rob Bradley Jr. – founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research – apparently isn’t one of them. He wishes IER were smaller and his work was less relevant. At his blog, MasterResource, Bradley has posted an interview of him done by Stephen Hicks, …
Rob Bradley Jr. Wishes His Organization Was Smaller and His Work Was Less Valuable Read More »
Michael Giberson In New York Mercantile Exchange Inc. v. IntercontinentalExchange Inc., the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit denied NYMEX copyright protection for its settlement prices. The decision turned on application of the merger doctrine in copyright law, which governs cases in which the expression of an idea is so completely linked to the idea itself …
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