The NYT
had a long story on the Chinese cough syrup poisoning. Antifreeze was labelled as glycerine in China and used in cough medicine in Panama. This is a great example for my article on trust and trade with the Third World. It’s also a good warning. I think I’ll stop eating canned food from China. (more…)
The Kennedy opinion in the Carhart partial-birth abortion case is interesting because it uses an information-failure argument at one point (rather inaptly for the Carhart law, since it implies that the law could be fixed by requiring the doctor to explain to the mother the grisly details of what he is going to do to her baby). Here is what he says.
There’s a very nice NASA-GISS site where you can click on a map of the United States to get monthly weather station temperatures since 1880. This will be useful to check out the facts when people say in conversation, “Oh, global warming has made it so much warmer this past few years around here.” Here’s some of the yearly averages for Bloomington, Indiana.
1980 11.71
1981 11.88
1982 11.08
1983 13.19
1984 11.3
1985 12.73
1986 12.39
1987 12.89
1988 12.11
1989 11.83
1990 12.32
1991 13.38
1992 12.18
1993 11.68
1994 11.97
1995 12.43
1996 10.91
1997 10.9
1998 13.64
1999 13.17
2000 12.06
2001 11.74
2002 12.76
2003 11.22
2004 12.26
2005 12.58
This data on monthly deviations from 1961-1990 monthly temperatures may be a bit hard to read, but it is interesting. It shows that the past decade has been warmer than 1961-1990, but it isn’t clear that the world is getting warmer in the 21st century. The source is the IPCC, a group which supports efforts to stop global warming.
The yearly averages are:
Year Average
1996 0.205
1997 0.462
1998 0.817
1999 0.487
2000 0.361
2001 0.553
2002 0.661
2003 0.641
2004 0.612
2005 0.745
2006 0.658
From Marginal Revolution:
It is a little known fact that the United States today uses far less water per person, and less water in total, than we did twenty-five years ago. It must be due to more efficient irrigation.
That is water expert Peter Gleick, quoted in the excellent article “The Last Drop,” (not on-line), from the 23 October The New Yorker.
Here is more detail.
* Total water use in the US in 2000 is lower than it was in 1975.
* Per-capita water use in the US in 2000 is lower than it has been since the mid-1950s.
* The economic productivity of water (dollars of Gross National Product per unit of water used) is higher than it has ever been: it has more than doubled since the 1970s, to $6.20 per hundred gallons used.
In August, a Bloomington man hurt himself when he “ignited a mortar-style firework that he taped to an old football helmet and placed on his head,” as it says here. This illustrates an important point for public policy: some people are dumb enough that if we prevent them from hurting themselves on way, they will find another way, so much our our burdensome safety regulation isn’t going to help save lives in the long run. (more…)
Amazingly enough, state law bans homemade cookies from schools. Still more amazingly, our local newspaper applauds this as an important safety measure. Next thing you know, it will be illegal for the kids to come home after school, because they might come into contact with homemade food.
This is prime evidence of what is wrong with liberals.
We’ve never heard of a case of a whole classroom suffering food poisoning because of a batch of mom’s cookies. But that doesn’t mean the schools shouldn’t enforce the legal requirement that class snacks be store-bought, ensuring they are from commercially inspected kitchens.
The state health code is also there to protect children from unexpected ingredients that might cause allergy or other reaction problems. For this reason, it’s important that teachers make a point of consulting the ingredients on packaged treats served for class parties.
…
Yes, yes, it’s too bad that school days can’t be what they used to be.
But with inventiveness, we can create new class party traditions that are just as treasured.
Michael Fumento’s “Ketamine and Depression” at the American Spectator sounds like big news, and an interesting medical study. One injection of ketamine caused immediate (within hours) improvement in two thirds of severely depressed patients, and a third of them were better even after a week. The sample was tiny (17), but they first did a double-blind, with zero improvement in the placebo patients, and then reversed the roles, and found that thos same patients improved with the ketamine in the second round. Ketamine is a dangerous drug (euphoric and hallucogenic), but the results are remarkable. If true, why aren’t asylums rushing to use this? Or are they?
BANS ON LIE DETECTOR TESTS are a great example of not just foolish but wasteful and dangerous government regulation. But to see how useful lie detector tests are, one must not ask scientists or lawyers; one must think about the data like an economist or businessman. (I don’t mean to insult scientists and lawyers–but just because all the smart scientists and lawyers agree on something is not a reliable guide to whether it is good policy.) Law professor Instapundit’s August 5, 2003 posting and the recent National Academy of Sciences report attacking lie detectors are prime examples of this. Using just these two sources and the anti-lie-detector August 3, 2003 Boston Globe story that Instapundit cites (now gone from the free site), we see that lie detectors actually are useful and effective, even without going to pro-lie-detector sources.
The district court ruling in the Wal-Mart case, RELI v. Fielder provides a lot to think about. One thing is that the Court says that it would not strike down a law even if its explicit purpose was to punish one company, Wal-Mart, because Wal-Mart, unlike, for example, homosexuals, is politically powerful and won’t be treated unjustly by the political process: (more…)
Here are some good lecture notes one quantities of carbon in the world.
Viscusi, Vernon and Harrington have this good table of activities which increase one’s annual risk of death by 1 in a million, which I use in teaching G406. While one may doubt the accuracy of particular’s (e.g., second-hand smoke), it’s a neat idea for a table.
Outsourcing is a topic burbling in the background of economic policy. Foreigners located abroad are replacing Americans in service jobs. Some people complain of this competition, which drives down American wages in those jobs. The situation is similar to two other disputes, over imported goods and over immigration, and the basic complaint, “loss of American jobs” is the same in all three. The three have interesting differences, though, which are to outsourcing’s advantage and perhaps explains why opposition to it has not gotten far in terms of actual protectionist policies. (more…)
OpinionJournal has an interesting op-ed on how the Pew Trust tried to get Congress to think there was popular demand for the campaign-finance “reform” that led to the big role of millionaire money in the 2004 election:
Mr. Treglia urged grantees to keep Pew’s role hush-hush. “If Congress thought this was a Pew effort,” he confided, “it’d be worthless. It’d be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain.” At one point, late in the congressional debate over McCain-Feingold, “we had a scare,” Mr. Treglia said. “George Will stumbled across a report we had done. . . . He started to reference the fact that Pew was playing a large role . . . [and] that it was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress. . . . The good news, from my perspective, was that journalists . . . just didn’t care and nobody followed up.” The hoaxers–a conspiracy of eight left-wing foundations, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation–have actually spent $123 million trying to get other people’s money out of politics since 1994, Mr. Sager reports–nearly 90% of the spending by the entire campaign-finance lobby over this period.
Claim on public TV show attacking capitalism: Wal-Mart has bigger
markups on the prdoucts it imports from China.
True or false?
A common idea is that a Pigouvian pollution tax has a “double dividend”: it reduces pollution, and it raises revenue (see Tullock 1967). The revenue is raised efficiently, because it allows other, distorting, taxes to be reduced. That is undoubtedly true. What has been in the literature since the 90’s is how high the pollution tax should be set. Should it be set to the marginal cost of pollution damage, or higher, or lower? (more…)
I just heard that I’m cited in Cooter and Ulen’s law and econ text for finding the story of how the philosopher Thales made money off his forecasting skill, and even leveraged it using a form of option and a cornering of a market. It’s great for teaching economics. Here’s the story from Aristotle’s Politics, for future reference. I’ve included the next story too, which is about how even the Greeks realized that monopoly was bad for the public welfare. (more…)
Professor Perri of Appalachian State sent me a very interesting point about why increases in the minimum wage could increase employment– while decreasing hours of employment at the same time. When the minimum wage rises, the cost of increasing HOURS PER WORKER increases faster than the cost of increasing THE NUMBER OF WORKERS if there are any fixed costs (hiring and training costs) per worker. Thus, in addition to the the other two effects when the minimum wage rises [which are the SCALE effect (the marginal cost of production rises, reducing profit maximizing output and the usage of all inputs), and the FIRST SUBSTITUTION EFFECT (firms use more capital and less labor)], the SECOND SUBSTITUTION EFFECT is for firms to increase the number of workers, and decrease hours per worker. This, last effect offsets (at least partially) the first two effects, making it harder to find disemployment effects of the minimum wage. Some will assert fixed cost are not large for low-skill workers, but indeed they may not be insignificant. Thus, workers lose hours, which makes them worse off since, if they tended to prefer fewer hours, firms would have been forced to offer them given how competitive the labor market is.
The point needs some expansion. If the marginal cost of a worker were constant, it would not work. Then, the employer would want to hire just one worker, to minimize the fixed cost, and work him 1000 hours per week. What is crucial is that the initial number of hours be enough that the marginal cost of a worker is rising.
A good model is that the marginal cost of a worker is constant for the first 40 hours per week, and then rises sharply with overtime, and then rises gradually as the worker’s effectiveness falls because he gets tired. Without the minimum wage increase, the employer and workers might find it optimal to hire workers at more than 40 hours per week, because it spreads the fixed cost of training. After the wage increase, the optimal number of hours will fall.
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