Political books can be a bit predictable. The challenge is often that right-wing people criticize the left-wing or left-wing people criticize the right-wing. This means you know where it is going before the book even starts. Depending upon your views, some comments might resonate more with you than others but the comments aren’t at all…
Category: Public Policy
Experts Need To Take Public Policy Interventions Seriously
Public policy recommendations are one way academics seek to influence the world. That said, I fear we often don’t give our recommendations much thought. They are tacked onto the end of papers to make the years of work done on the problem seem important enough to publish. This week, rather than look at a paper…
Sludges And Nudges
Cass Sunstein is a law professor who worked in the Obama White House. He dealt with matters of regulation, and has a keen interest in how (generally bad) program design and administration prevents action, e.g., sludge. He also is an expert on behavioral economics — he wrote Nudge with Richard Thaler. The idea of sludge…
What If I’m Wrong?
The Population Bomb shared Paul Ehrlich’s predictions about the future. After his doom-laden warnings about mass starvation and the need for population control, by compulsion if necessary, Ehrlich asked, “What if I’m wrong?” What if his Malthusian thinking is a mistake? (See here for Malthus). The author was trying to make the point that it…
Population As A Disaster
Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968. I read a version printed in 1988 which had a 1978 update. It is a gloomy book that makes bold claims of famine and crises. There have certainly been problems in the last 55 years but nothing like Ehrlich predicted. It is an over-the-top book written by…
Must Firms Maximize Shareholder Value?
What is the purpose of a firm? Given we have so many firms and business schools are such a sizable chunk of many universities, you might think that we all agree what firms are for. You would be wrong. There is a surprising amount of disagreement as to the purpose of firms. What are they…
Woke As A Magical Term
It is (nearly) always useful to read books that you don’t expect to agree with. Woke Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy is one of those. (Plus buying it means Amazon is now sending me lots of different recommendations for books by Ron DeSantis etc… which is a fun change). Ramaswamy is running in the Republican primary…
The Environmental Impacts Of Foods
There are many things that can impact a person’s, and a community’s, impact upon the environment. Some things we might be able to stop doing. That is not the case with eating food. We have a large number of people on the planet and we all have to eat. As such, an important question is…
Do People Vote With Their Wallets?
One of the classic problems in understanding voter behavior is whether people vote with their wallets. Bascially, do voters make choices that depend heavily upon their own economic self-interest? Like almost any social science question you are never going to get 100% compliance with any idea. One can almost certainly find someone who calculates what…
Working In the Doughnut
Kate Raworth has a popular book on sustainability and economics. In it, she argues that economics needs an overhaul. It is an admirably ambitious book with some flaws but with excellent parts to more than makeup for them. What does Raworth say about working in the doughnut? How To Understand Working In the Doughnut Raworth…
