Updated 2023/01/03 As Isaiah Berlin said, freedom for wolves is death to the lambs. Everyone likes more freedom, but all the freedoms that people debate about are contentious because increasing one person’s freedoms reduces the freedoms of others. In theory…
Blog Archives
Replace GDP With Median Income
UPDATE: See the MELI FAQ for more up-to-date information about how and why we should reform the use of GDP. The reigning measure of economic progress and development is GDP per capita. Sure the United Nation’s Human Development Index (HDI)…
Posted in Medianism, MELI & Econ Stats
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)…
Queues in Time or Money
In my health economics class, students often think that America has faster waiting times for medical procedures than other nations because they have heard about healthcare systems like Canada that have waiting lists for procedures that the government considers to…
Posted in Medianism, Public Finance
It Is Rich to Blame Robin Hood For Recessions
A recession is a decrease in total production. There are two possible reasons why this could happen. One is a decrease in aggregate supply caused be a decrease in productivity and the other is a decrease in aggregate demand caused…
The Median American Is Poorer Then The Median In Other Rich Countries
In my last post, I argued that the median American has tolerated the rise in inequality partly because median consumption has been temporarily buoyed by rising indebtedness. Here is one data point from Kenneth Thomas, the author of the Middle…
Posted in Medianism
Does The Median American Care About Median Income? Does The Median Even Know?
John Cassidy put together some recent findings on inequality and showed a famous chart from Emmanuel Saez, of Berkeley, of the share of pre-tax income enjoyed by the top 1% richest earners in America compared with everyone else. The basic story…
Medianism 