According to headlines today, Trump finally started to work on his campaign promise to crack down on Chinese imports. But he is just targeting imports of solar panels from China! Although this is an extremely important issue for the solar…
Yearly Archives: 2018
#Pence2018 because Pence wouldn’t need to illegally use campaign funds to pay hush money to porn star to cover up an affair
Nor would a president Ryan nor just about any other plausible president I can think of. Let’s put this ugliness behind us as soon as possible. The Republicans who control both houses of Congress have a choice and it should…
Posted in Pence2018
#Pence2018: Trump and Pence will unite the nation in 2018 because liberals and conservatives both agree that Pence is much more honorable and less dangerous.
When Trump first began as president, he was at his peak popularity. As Americans have seen him in action, he has gotten steadily less popular. Even when Trump was elected, 60% of voters thought that he was not qualified to…
Posted in Pence2018
Why doesn’t Amazon police their own product reviews? Market failures in everything.
About a decade ago I started seeing a lot of fake product reviews on Amazon.com. They used to be easy to spot because sometimes a bunch of reviews in a row would have almost exactly the same comments. Or sometimes…
Posted in Managerial Micro
What about Honor?
I was chosen to be Bluffton’s Civic Engagement Day scholar for 2018 and so I’ll be lecturing about honor for Civic Engagement Day and at the Presidential Scholarship Competition next week. I had to assign a reading about honor to the prospective…
Posted in Philosophy and ethics
The best marijuana policy is the least popular: decriminalization
Americans tend to be conservatives in the sense that we tend to be risk averse. We don’t want to change our system unless there is a really good reason. But we are embarking on a radical social experiment in marijuana…
Posted in Health, Public Finance
Market failures in everything: Book publishing
Markets are only efficient when they are close to perfect competition, and if they are efficient there should not be shortages and surpluses. However, there are persistently large surpluses and shortages in the book publishing industry. There is a particularly…
Posted in Managerial Micro, Public Finance
Medianism 