Maui and Montana Ramona and I just returned from an academic meeting in Maui. We found new confirmation that economics is really a sub-set of behavioral ecology (or evolutionary biology if you prefer). Here’s an example. After an all night flight, we awoke at our ranch this morning with 3″ of snow and a large […]
Read MoreIn the now classic The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965) the author Mancur Olson wrote: “(O)nly a separate and ‘selective’ incentive will stimulate a rational individual in a latent group to act in a group-oriented way”; that is, members of a large group will not act in the […]
Read MoreMilton Friedman is one of my all time favorite economists, Tom Schelling another. Both won Nobel prizes and each contributed greatly to my understanding of how the world works. I knew Milton and Rose longer but Tom and Alice much better. While we live geographically far apart and the Friedman’s are gone, the Schelling’s remain […]
Read MoreA version of this article appeared February 21, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Perverse Incentives of the Lawyers Guild. While law school enrollment drops, ABA rules bust the budgets. Law schools are in trouble. Applications are down almost 50% to an estimated 54,000 this […]
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Senators know that even unpaid entry-level work can be valuable. That’s why they make some of their employees work for nothing. President Obama called in his State of the Union for an increase in the minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015, from $7.25, notwithstanding the evidence that it will increase unemployment among young, […]
Read MoreIntroduced here by Dr. John Baden A Tale of Two Cities, Boulder and Bozeman First, an admission: I like Boulder, Colorado–as a place to visit and from which to learn. I’ve been there several times and always enjoyed my visits. Many say Bozeman is like Boulder was 30 plus years ago. They mean that as […]
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Anyone who pays even passing attention to American politics is familiar with the map (Figure 1) of the United States showing states in which a majority of voters favored President Obama (colored blue) and those where Romney garnered the most votes (in red). This map conveys three dominant messages: first, that states can be meaningfully […]
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This article reprinted from The American magazine, a publication of the American Enterprise Insitute. Web address: www.american.com The Swedish political Right has increasingly managed to recapture the support of a large segment of the chattering classes. There may be lessons for the United States. Ask most Europeans or coastal Americans: “Who are smarter, liberals or […]
Read MoreThis FREE Insight is a warm recommendation of a book by WWII veteran Warren R. Higgins, The Wednesday Pen. His daughter, Ris Higgins, is a Bozeman friend. She lovingly edited this volume and it was just published by Brown books of Dallas, Texas. This is a most unusual book. It’s a collection of letters, one […]
Read MoreIntroduced by Dr. John A. Baden, PhD Here is one great truth that has stuck with me since I was an undergraduate. There is little disagreement among micro economists; their basic model is largely uncontested. This field studies the behavior of individual households and firms in making decisions on the allocation of limited resources. It examines markets and […]
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