Michael Giberson The Wall Street Journal reports on recent efforts to make sure that taxpayers are getting their money’s worth from state universities. Acknowledging that his comments “could be taken as special pleading,” a blogger who is also a Texas state employee providing university students with advanced instruction in financial economics offers his insights about …
Michael Giberson From xkcd: [HT: John Whitehead at Environmental Economics.]
Michael Giberson Robin Hanson observes that prospects are not promising for health-case cost containment, in part due to a normal reluctance to give up on sacred values in exchange for money. I wonder if this same psychological factor is activated in emergency conditions which present opportunities to trade the sacred for cash, and if it …
Michael Giberson Recently I went looking for a source for the idea that special interest lobbying succeeds due to the logic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Frequently in economics and especially among public choice analysts the concept is attributed to Mancur Olson and sometimes specifically to The Logic of Collective Action. For example, in …
Michael Giberson Some food for thought. For months and months, it seems, these three items – “Roast potatoes,” “Elinor Ostrom,” “Whole Foods competitors” – have dominated the “Top Searches” list in the Knowledge Problem site stats. We blog a lot about energy, economics, and public policy. Once in a while a bit of food or drink …
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Michael Giberson Arizona is re-thinking its open range law. Dan Cole, blogging at Law, Economics & Cycling, is reminded of Ronald Coase (and specifically Robert Ellickson’s law review article “Of Coase and Catttle“). Cole summarizes the situation: Arizona is an “open range” state, which means that cattle can roam at will. Ranchers do not have …
Michael Giberson Streetwise Professor dubs F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom “An Intellectual Gateway Drug.” Craig Pirrong writes: “Amazingly, Hayek’s 60+ year old Road to Serfdom is the subject of contemporary political discussion even though in many ways it is about a world that disappeared long ago–and in, fact, never really existed, though Hayek feared that such a …
Michael Giberson David Harrington has an article in the new issue of Regulation on the consequences of state repeal of laws that put caps on ticket resale prices: “Uncapping Ticket Markets.” Harrington used StubHub data to compare NHL ticket resale prices in states that repealed price caps on resales to prices in states that hadn’t …
Michael Giberson The blogosphere is a tinderbox and an errant spark can trigger a storm of fire. In this case the spark was a news story about a city fire department refusing to put out a house fire for a home outside the city limits. For Salon writer Alex Pareene, curiously, this story implies something …
Michael Giberson I was fortunate to have a class with James Buchanan my first semester as a graduate student at George Mason University. Unfortunately, it was the year after he had been awarded the Nobel prize, and he was still doing a lot of traveling and speaking. He wasn’t around nearly enough to suit me …
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