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Category Archives: Economics
Legislative lotteries?
Did you know the U.S. House of Representatives uses a lottery to allocate office space to its new members? Why doesn’t the Congress use a lottery system for budget appropriations as well? By way of example, why not (a) set … Continue reading
Markets in infrastructure?
Why not? Brock Cusick‘s eloquent essay “Here’s an idea better than net neutrality” is by far the best thing we have read on this well-worn subject in some time. Spoiler alert: Mr Cusick recommends a market approach to Internet service. (Hat … Continue reading
Vampire Freakonomics
What Can Vampires Teach Us About Economics? http://t.co/rLJzvcwnBj — Freakonomics (@Freakonomics) November 1, 2014 Check out this fun Freakonomics podcast featuring economists Steve Horwitz and Glen Whitman as well as yours truly, and while you’re at it, why not check out the Economics of the Undead blog too?
Happy Singles’ Day!
Today (11.11) is Singles’ Day (光棍节), an anti-Valentine’s Day holiday celebrated in China in honor of all bachelors and bachelorettes. Moreover, according to this report by Hayley Peterson, China’s Singles’ Day is also the world’s biggest online shopping day of the year! In the … Continue reading
Is Google a monopoly?
To be more precise, is Google a coercive or innocent monopoly under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. (Click on the image above for a better look of search engine market shares. Also, for what it’s worth, the folks at Google … Continue reading
Law of necessity (volcanic lava edition)
The magnificent Tyler Cowen — over at Marginal Revolution — poses the following question: Is it legal to build a diversion barrier against Hawaiian lava flow? The ancient doctrine Necessitas non habet legem provides the most likely answer. County of Hawaii media image of … Continue reading
Why is Microsoft Outlook still so crappy?
Let us count the ways … It is slow and laborious to open. Outlook Calendar is fundamentally flawed. Attaching a document requires a cumbersome five(!)-step procedure. It doesn’t let you cut-and-paste content from a Word file directly into the message of … Continue reading
How easy is it to fix an NFL game?
Match fixing has occurred in soccer leagues around the world, so why should the NFL (or college football, for that matter) be any different? In fact, according to this devious report by Brian “The-Fix-Is-In” Touhy, it is much easier to “fix” or … Continue reading
Posted in Deception, Economics, Law, Questions Rarely Asked, Sports
Tagged bets, Match-fixing
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Infinite regress, bias, and the Coase theorem
In their paper “Motive attribution asymmetry for love vs. hate drives intractable conflict,” Adam Waytz, Liane Young and Jeremy Ginge appear to extend the logic of the Coase Theorem into the domain of politics. Specifically, Waytz, Young, and Ginge study the problem of … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Law, Philosophy, Politics
Tagged Bias, Coase Theorem, Infinite Regress
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“The possibility of a general theory of emergency”
That is the subtitle of this fascinating paper — the full title of the paper is “Exception and Necessity: The Possibility of a General Theory of Emergency” — written by our colleague William Vazquez-Irizarry, a law professor at the University of Puerto Rico. … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Law, Philosophy
Tagged John Rawls, Necessity, Ronald Coase, State of Exception
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prior probability 