Whether we’re trying to save species or specie, decisions are based on information and incentives. Regulations that generate poor incentives simply won’t work. Good intentions are not enough. Congress tried to protect endangered species via the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973. Prior to 1973, landowners could freely use their land, even if endangered species […]

Here is my gift to you for this Christmas season and the ones to follow. If you have friends and relatives for whom it’s hard to buy holiday gifts, you’ll find economic thinking helpful indeed. But you may wonder how economists, followers of the “dismal science,” can contribute to the holiday season? Surely not by […]

“By establishing a nonprofit trust to manage the Presidio’s property, it gives us a blueprint for national parks that one day will be able to sustain themselves without government funds,” President Bill Clinton announced last month. He was in part referring to legislation he signed which turned over management of the Presidio National Park in […]

In Idaho, state wildlife biologists are doing something they never learned in college—teaching trout how to eat native foods. It seems that the hatchery-raised fish, fed a diet of protein pellets instead of stoneflies, have developed rather discriminating palates. They react to worms and other traditional fare the way most five-year-olds do to broccoli. This […]