Greg Mankiw reports that a lady in Britain was prevented from supplementing her state-provided healthcare with private care. Apparently the NHS favours equality over efficiency: Officials said that allowing Mrs. Hirst and others like her to pay for extra drugs to supplement government care would violate the philosophy of the health service by giving richer […]
The Congressional Budget Office reported recently on its comparison of a cap-and-trade program to a carbon tax program. The one-line conclusion is that carbon taxes are cheaper and simpler, but caps give more certainty.
Stats NZ reports a marked increase in the NZ birth rate. There are three ways to view this: first, you could use it as Quest does to suggest that maths and equations are stupid and we should just trust the politicians’ instincts. Unfortunately for Quest, there is no statistical evidence for that position 😛 The […]
After my recent post, which dealt with issues of equity, I have been invited to consider how appropriate it is to bring normative issues in to a discussion of economics. I was referred to a paper which discusses the distinction between economics as a science and political economy: For Robbins, the science of economics and […]
A blind couple are outraged that they got charged extra at a hotel when their dogs allegedly moutled all over the place and required extra cleaning work to be done. There appears to be some dispute over exactly what happened, and the manager of the hotel is clearly a PR disaster area, but is it […]
The Washington Post (via Overcoming Bias) reports that …when volunteers heard about the risks of nanotechnology from different experts, they gravitated toward the views of experts who seemed to share their personal values… When people clash on hot-button issues, their disagreements may have more to do with clashing values than facts. The finding has strong […]