Blog

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…

  • Better Business Meets Politics

    I recently published an article in the Journal of Sustainable Marketing. This discussed the intersection between politics and better business. What is happening as better business meets politics? Should Business Stay Out Of Politics? There are two ways to look at this question. Firstly, there is a wider question. This can be seen as an…

  • Zero Sum Thinking

    Heather McGhee has a popular book on the problem of zero sum thinking. Her specific focus is on racism in the US. The argument is quite simple. Racism prevents policies that would benefit everyone. Zero Sum Thinking People often have a tendency to think of the world as having a fixed amount of a certain…

  • Epidemiological Transition

    A second post on Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape. Here I discuss the epidemiological transition that he notes. There is a general movement in the way disease tends to afflict a country (and indeed across the whole world). The problems of disease, what the diseases are, and who they target, have a distinct pattern. Epidemiological…

  • 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…

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