Millions of people have seen a great 6-minute video that explains research about inequality by Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke [pdf]. Unfortunately, the video propagates a common misleading trope by claiming that a perfectly…
Blog Archives
It Is OK That Raising The Minimum Wage Hurts Someone
Economists like to talk a lot about Pareto improvements. This is the idea that you can make a change that improves life for somebody and hurts nobody. A Pareto improvement is obviously always an good idea. Nobody could object by…
Complaints About Moral Hazard In Health Care Are Frequently Immoral
Mutilitarianism is money-metric utilitarianism in which ‘the social good’ is measured in money according to each individual’s willingness and ability to pay (WAP). One of the immoral tenets of standard economics is the mutilitarian idea that the demand curve (WAP)…
Manufacturing Meritocracy
I was recently talking with some wealthy parents and I was struck by how they are able to lavish private preschool education on their children that cost more than the $30,000 tuition at private colleges like Bluffton University and then…
Posted in Inequality, Labor
Distribution Matters
Kevin Drum gives a little statistical lesson about how thresholds have very different effects when they apply to the center or the tail of a statistical distribution. In the case of violent criminals, a slight shift in the distribution has…
Medianism 