How welfare impacts on the poor
Attached is a post by James Kwak. It strongly rejects a comment by Caplan and Beaulier that Behavioral Economics will Undermine the welfare state by...
Any alternatives to a levy?
I might have preferred for the Government to take a risk with the surplus in 2012/13, and perhaps to have a go at middle-class welfare,...
Economic growth and distributive justice
I have often worried about whether promoting ‘efficiency” – in the economic sense – ensures maximum well being where it makes some people better off...
Watching what goes on in China is a vital part of the global ‘big picture’
(Originally published in the business pages of the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 24th March 2010) When I first began writing about the global...
Quantifying Institutions
How can we quantify culture? This sounds ridiculous. It sounds like a quixotic intellectual conceit. But I think the idea is important to economics because...
The Rise of Trickle-Up?
The one thing most people now agree on is that this global financial crisis is exactly that, that it is a crisis. It is very...