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Levine and Zheng review the evidence: The relationship between economic theory and experimental evidence is controversial. One could easily get the impression from reading the experimental literature that economic theory has little or no significance for explaining experimental results. The point of this essay is that this is a tremendously misleading impression. Economic theory makes […]
Plenty has been written on the inadequacy of GDP as a measure of welfare and numerous alternative measures have been constructed. Given the proliferation of alternatives, we might wish to know what additional informational content they have over and above GDP. Grimes et al presented a paper at this year’s NZAE conference that investigates the […]
Economists often get criticised for trying to emulate physicists by arriving at a set of equations that describe human behaviour. There have been innumerable critiques of that approach and the predictive power of economic models is notoriously poor. This article was written in 1986 but feels as if it could have been written yesterday. …economics, […]
Apparently New York is banning large soft drink cup sizes to reduce sugar consumption and obesity. Eric has used this as a launchpad for a slippery slope argument attacking libertarian paternalism (LP). The original idea of Sunstein and Thaler was that you could design choices to minimise the likelihood of bad decisions without restricting choice. […]
From Rogeberg on rational addiction: Theories of rational addiction make assumptions concerning the choice rule, preferences and beliefs of people, and derive the resulting consumption plans. … Some economists claim support from the famous as-if methodology of Friedman 1953 … which explicitly identifies prediction as the only aim of “positive economics.”…[Such] explanations may prove excellent […]
From Andrew Geddis: National plan to legislate to permit the ongoing “civil detention” of offenders deemed at high risk of future sexual or violent offending even after their jail sentence [is] complete. Civil detention[,] now apparently called “Public Protection Orders”… would thus be a retrospective restriction applied to some prisoners on top of the original […]