Quotulatiousness

August 31, 2017

“Harvey is not Katrina”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Nicole Gelinas on the crucial differences between the situation faced by New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and that currently faced by Houston after being inundated by Hurricane Harvey:

The Houston region has received record rain, more falling in less than a week than it usually does in a year, and at least 30 people, including a Houston police officer, have died. Harvey, however, is not Katrina. One measure of this difference is in electricity provision. After Katrina, New Orleans was almost entirely without power for weeks. In Houston, by contrast, 94 percent of customers still had power as of early Wednesday.

Though we won’t know for sure for a while, the fact that Houston has kept the power on is likely in part a legacy of infrastructure investment after previous storms. Five years ago, Hurricane Ike actually cut power to 95 percent of Houston. But, as NPR reported after the storm, the city’s power company, CenterPoint, took steps after Ike, as well as after Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, to upgrade the grid, spending $400 million. Houston, helped by $50 million in federal money, cut down tens of thousands of trees along power lines and outfitted poles with the ability to re-route electricity away from damaged routes toward undamaged ones.

With power, hospitals can continue to operate; even Ben Taub Hospital, surrounded by water, kept the power on. Stores, too, have quickly begun to reopen. Power also means that people whose homes didn’t flood can stay put, lessening the burden on police to keep neighborhoods safe from looters. If the power stays on — as it should, now that worst of the storm is over — Houston should do well. If it goes out, the city will have far more serious problems.

[…]

Empty neighborhoods and business districts invite looting. Houston had already arrested 15 people as of late Tuesday for allegedly trying to steal everything from liquor to an ATM, and for attempted robbery, as well. These arrests, plus a nighttime curfew, are a good sign; after Katrina, New Orleans police officers failed to keep control over the city, both because of the severity of the damage, which left most of the city empty and dark, but also due to their longstanding poor performance. Harris County district attorney Kim Ogg and Houston police chief Art Acevado have already set the right tone to deter wrongdoing. Ogg said Tuesday that thieves “are going to feel the full weight of the law,” and Acevedo said he would push for tough sentences for people convicted. In New Orleans, by contrast, state and local officials’ apocalyptic invocation of “martial law,” rather than calm reliance on the rule of normal law, only exacerbated the sense of chaos.

With some, though not most, Houston neighborhoods now deserted, state law enforcement have a role to play here, as well, with federal support. A competent local police force will be busy, after a storm, in helping still-populated areas. In turn, state police and the National Guard, who have less experience interacting with people on a neighborhood level, can help by patrolling and securing empty areas. To that end, Texas has already activated the National Guard, adding 12,000 people to safety efforts, as well as for rescue and food distribution.

Oh, and as Caroline Baum points out, don’t be misled by idiotic claims that hurricane damage is somehow good for the economy:

You will no doubt hear assertions that the rebuilding effort will provide a boost to contractors, manufacturers and GDP in general. But before these claims turn into predictable nonsense about all the good that comes from natural disasters, I thought it might be useful to provide some context for these sorts of events.

The destruction wrought by a hurricane and flooding qualifies as a negative supply shock. Normal production and distribution channels are destroyed or disrupted. Producers have to find less-efficient (i.e. more expensive) ways to transport their goods. The net effect is lost output and income, and higher prices.

Over the years, I’ve observed a tendency among economists and traders to view such events through a demand-side prism. They see lost income translating into reduced spending on goods and services, which might even warrant some largesse from the central bank.

Of course, that is precisely the wrong medicine. Supply shocks reduce output and raise prices. The Federal Reserve’s interest-rate medicine affects demand. Lower interest rates will increase the demand for gasoline, among other goods and services, but they have no effect on supply. An easing of monetary policy under such circumstances would increase demand for already curtailed supply, raising prices even more.

But wait. What about all the new construction and investment necessitated by the devastation? Homeowners will have to rebuild. Businesses will have to replace destroyed or damaged plants and equipment. Pretty soon, we should start to hear about a boost to GDP growth.

In the short run, yes. But focus on the prefix, “re,” as in re-building and re-placing. After a natural disaster, housing starts are bound to increase, but there will be no net addition to the supply of homes. Capital spending will increase as well, but it will not expand the nation’s capital stock.

She also provides a link to this very topical essay by Frédéric Bastiat: That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen. In short, we see the spending caused by the need to repair damages (in this case from the flooding), but we don’t see what might have been done if the money hadn’t needed to be spent just to replace existing stock.

August 29, 2017

The benefits and costs of an “open borders” policy

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Thompson linked to this Ben Sixsmith article on the pro and con arguments for open borders:

No one except a militant nativist would deny that some level of immigration is beneficial and should be accepted. After that, we face a question of scale. There are those, however, on the opposite end of the spectrum, who believe that no level of immigration should ever be denied. These are advocates of “open borders”; an idea as strange as that of the nativist — yet more dangerous for being considered respectable.

The liberal Economist magazine contains an essay promoting open borders. It imagines a world in which people are free to live and work wherever they please. It is an astonishingly biased and unreflective piece, which illuminates dangerous extremes of progressive utopianism:

Perhaps I sound inhuman. Who could dislike people living and working wherever they please? It can be a splendid thing, but if everybody did it think of what that would entail. The Economist reports that if borders were opened, 630 million people would be likely to migrate. Perhaps 138 million would go to the US, expanding its population by almost a half. About 42 million would join the British, expanding their numbers by more than a half. How many would go to Australia, a country with a population of 24 million, and with infrastructure already under strain? Such influxes would pose monumental demographic changes, soon made more dramatic by the higher birth rates. It will be exacerbated by the fact that local governments will not be able to keep up with the building of roads, hospitals, schools and transport systems that citizens — both old and new — will demand.

A commenter at David’s blog quips that “It’s amazing how quickly the Economist turned into the Guardian“, but The Economist began to go in that direction quite suddenly in the late 1990s … at least, that was the point I noticed and gave up my annual subscription. As The Economist generally does not use author bylines, it’s not clear whether the change was driven by editorial diktat or staff changes over time, but what used to be a pretty staunch free market newspaper (as they prefer to call themselves) turned into a British version of typical American “liberal” magazines.

As Sixsmith points out, the masses of would-be immigrants to the west are not an undifferentiated cultural mass with broadly similar cultural, educational, and demographic profiles:

But what of proposed merits of open borders? A consistent failure of the Economist’s article is a reluctance to distinguish between different migrants. If one finds the study, it turns out that 54% of the men and women who expressed a desire to migrate came from Africa and the Middle East — with another 20% being from Central America. Yet the most successful immigrants, in terms of launching businesses and earning wealth, have been found to hail from Asia and Europe. A UCL study found that European immigrants to Britain contribute more to the economy than they take from it while the opposite is true for non-European immigrants. It is senseless, then, to claim, as the author of The Economist article does, that immigrants are “more likely than the native-born to bring new ideas and start their own businesses”. Immigrants do not come from “Immigrantland”. Population differences related to entrepreneurial and earning potential are real, and significant, and difficult to bridge.

QotD: The power of unions

Filed under: Business, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Moreover, the ability of unions to raise the wages of some workers does not mean that universal unionism could raise the wages of all workers. On the contrary, and this is a fundamental source of misunderstanding, the gains that strong unions win for their members are primarily at the expense of other workers.

The key to understanding the situation is the most elementary principle of economics: the law of demand — the higher the price of anything, the less of it people will be willing to buy. Make labor of any kind more expensive and the number of jobs of that kind will be fewer.

Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, 1980.

August 27, 2017

Stop Subsidizing Sports!

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 25 Aug 2017

Let’s talk about “sports”—that thing where we gather around to watch a muscular stranger put a regulation-size ball in a specific location.

Why are taxpayers forced to pony up cash for athletic ventures that don’t benefit them? Franchise owners routinely extort massive stadium subsidies through threats of relocation and fake promises of economic revitalization. Universities jack up student rates to subsidize athletic programs that should be self-sustaining. And the Olympics is economically devastating to every municipality foolish enough to get suckered by one of the oldest scams around.

Mostly Weekly host Andrew Heaton explores the sports phenomenon and why we should quit throwing other people’s money at it.

Links, past episodes, and more at https://reason.com/reasontv/2017/08/25/stop-subsidizing-sports

Script by Sarah Siskind with writing assistant from Andrew Heaton and David Fried.
Edited by Austin Bragg and Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.

Why The Rich Like High Taxes

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 16 Aug 2017

When politicians raise taxes on the rich, what do the rich do to protect their $$$? This Prof. shows how high taxes actually made America less equal.

The Myth of Equality in the 1950s (video): Another myth of the 1950s is that there was economic equality. Prof. Brian Domitrovic explains why this is a myth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLl9wOivHdc
How Cronyism is Hurting the Economy (video): Prof. Jason Brennan explains why cronyism, like the tax cuts for certain businesses in the 1950s, is bad for the economy and argues why limiting the government’s power would help solve the problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSgUENZ9O94
The Good Ol’ Days: When Tax Rates Were 90 Percent (article): Andrew Syrios compares the tax rates in the 1950s to those of the 1980s and today https://mises.org/library/good-ol-days-when-tax-rates-were-90-percent

TRANSCRIPT:
For a full transcript please visit: http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/why-the-rich-like-high-taxes/

QotD: Communism wouldn’t have worked any better with modern computers

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At the New Republic, Malcolm Harris asks an interesting question: Was the Soviet Union’s problem that Communism can never work? Or did the Soviets just need a lot more MacBook Airs?

Actually, Harris is channeling Paul Mason, the author of the book he is reviewing, and unfortunately, he doesn’t really try to answer the question. Instead he makes the stridently timid argument that this won’t happen because the capitalists won’t let it, at least without a healthy dose of revolutionary action.

I’ll swing for the fences and argue that no, even with better computers, Communism isn’t going to work. Nor some gauzy vision of post-capitalism that looks like Communism, but with YouTube videos.

In retrospect, Communism seems wildly stupid, or at least, incredibly naive. Did the people who dreamed up this system not understand the enormous incentive problems they were creating? As Ayn Rand dramatized the problem in Atlas Shrugged: “It’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm — so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done?” The incentives of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” drive toward falling production, which means there won’t be enough to cover the needs.

Or as a former colleague who fled Communist Poland once told me, “They pretended to pay us, and we pretended to work.” There is a reason that basically all the Communist and Socialist regimes ended in some degree of authoritarianism.

How could anyone who had, y’know, met some people in their visit to our planet, not see that this was coming? Large swathes of Communist and Socialist writing was naive and impractical. But the idealists weren’t entirely unaware that when monetary incentives disappeared, they would need to find other ways to get people to do things.

Megan McArdle, “Yes, Computers Have Improved. No, Communism Hasn’t”, Bloomberg View, 2015-09-02.

August 25, 2017

QotD: The “job” of literature between the wars

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Until round about WWI when the wheels came off European culture (and in that strata, American taste always molded itself on European taste, starting before the revolution) “high culture” and “proper taste” which defined “quality literature” involved the author making sure the upper classes knew he was one of them. That is, the story would be full of literary references, to either classical literature (a lot) or to various artists and writers which had become hallmarks of high culture. (Shakespeare or Chaucer, not “quality” or high class in their own times, but rendered more difficult and therefore more rarefied a taste by the change in language.)

Then the wheels came off. There was some insurgence and some of this type of thing before then, mind, but it was after WWI that self-loathing became the hallmark of the upper classes in Europe. Then, because they were still the elite and (in their own eyes) the taste makers, the mark of rarefied good taste became the nostalgie de la boue. Where Shakespeare and his like had written about kings and queens or at least Lords and Ladies, increasingly the “modern” and cutting edge literature bypassed even decent middle class who were despised as bourgeois and concentrated on ne’er do wells, the criminal element, the lowest of the low in morals more than in money. Alternately it concentrated on the corruption and bankrupt morals of the [nouveau riche], the noblemen, those that could be seen as winners in life.

This is what Agatha Christie in her Miss Marple books more than once characterizes as “Unpleasant people in unpleasant circumstances, doing unpleasant things.”

This trend, roughly akin to an adolescent reveling in writing things that upset his parents, as communism became an established thing and the USSR reached out tendrils of propaganda to the west, turned into a mess of set-pieces, the “international realism” of socialists, about as artistically relevant as the national realism of the fascists. It became set pieces to the point that you REALLY need to question your cultural assumptions to get at the truth.

The “literature” of this type has given us the exploited mill workers, for instance, living in horror and squalor. While this is absolutely true when compared to the conditions of our time, those mill workers didn’t get the chance to live in our time, in the conditions of our time. They had the choice of living off the land or going to the city and living in factories. Life on the land has been painted with the soft tints of the romantics and the glorious tints of the early Marxists, but if you actually LOOK at the industrial revolution going on before our eyes in China or India, you realize people are coming to the cities and getting factory jobs because life is BETTER there than in the rural fastnesses they come from. Sure, their lives as industrial workers would horrify American workers, but they’re relatively good for what they have available.

In this sense, the literature of that time did its job which was to sell a socialist future (though most of the authors who were trying to write quality were probably unaware of what they were doing or how the dictates of “quality” came from a self-hating and often outright traitorous elite.) It shaped even the minds of those who are naturally suspicious of socialist tripe.

Sarah A. Hoyt, “The Quality of Writing”, According to Hoyt, 2015-10-11.

August 24, 2017

Words & Numbers: Child Labor Was Wiped Out by Markets, Not Government

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Published on 23 Aug 2017

In 1938 the US government passed the Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a forty hour work week, establishing a minimum wage, and prohibiting child labor. Because of legislation like this, government is often credited for making the American work environment safer and more fair. Yet, as Antony Davies and James Harrigan demonstrate with historical data, market forces were already making things easier on the American worker long before the FLSA.

Learn More:
https://fee.org/articles/child_labor_was_wiped_out_by_markets_not_government
https://youtu.be/0zq-2cKENOc

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/09/viral-image/does-8-hour-day-and-40-hour-come-henry-ford-or-lab/

https://fee.org/articles/child_labor_was_wiped_out_by_markets_not_government

Data:

http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/CT1970p1-05.pdf
See page 170 for average weekly work hours.
See page 134 for child labor rates.

August 23, 2017

On the most recent figures, people do want to pay more tax … just not many of ’em, and not very much

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Last month, I posted an item on the Norwegian experiment in encouraging taxpayers to pay more than they owed in national tax. More recently, Tim Worstall reports an uptick in UK taxpayers voluntarily sending Her Majesty’s government more than they owed:

… the greater publicity of this ability to pay more has indeed led to more people making those extra voluntary payments. Further, to a more regular reporting of how many do so:

    Jeremy Corbyn’s claim that many people want to pay “more tax” to clear the national debt or fund public services has been undermined by official figures.

    Figures disclosed by the Government show that just 15 taxpayers made financial gifts worth less than £200,000 to the Government over the past two years.

15 people is of course more than 5.

    The Debt Management Office said that £180,393 in 2016/17 and £14,558 in 2015/16 was made in these voluntary payments.

    Most of this came from a single bequest of £177,700 in the last financial year. The other donated or bequeathed by the other 14 people were for relatively trivial sums. Someone gave 1p, another gave 3p and a third person handed over £1.84 to the Government.

Although not that much more then if we’re honest about it.

[…]

At which point something economists are most insistent upon. What people say is nowhere near as good a guide to their beliefs as what people do is. Expressed preferences are all very well but the truth comes from revealed preferences. Many might say they will pay higher taxes in order to gain more government. Very few do, so few that we can dismiss the expressed wish as being untrue.

It could of course be true that many would like other people to pay more in taxes, it could even be true that some to many would happily pay more if others did as well. But those are different things, the argument that people wish to pay higher taxes themselves and themselves alone has been tested and been found to be wrong–simply because when the opportunity is made available people don’t.

Once again, for my Canadian readers, it’s totally legal and acceptable to pay Her Majesty in right of Canada any additional monies you might feel are appropriate…

Intro to Stock Markets

Filed under: Business, Economics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 5 Jul 2016

Today, we’ll examine a new kind of financial intermediary: stock markets.

As an individual, you participate in the stock market when you buy a company’s shares. This turns you into a part-owner, entitled to some of the company’s profits. Sometimes, profits are paid out directly via dividends. Other times, profits are reinvested for company growth. In this case, you benefit by seeing the value of your shares rise in tandem with this growth.

Still, the buying and selling of stock doesn’t actually create any new investment. Buying and selling only transfers ownership between stockholders. What actually creates investment is when a company offers stock to the public for the first time (known as an Initial Public Offering or IPO), which is when it issues new shares to raise money for key ventures.

This process of turning savings into investment is what makes the stock market an intermediary.

A key caveat, though — buying stock essentially means betting on a company. As with all gambles, sometimes it pays off, sometimes, it doesn’t. For you as a saver, this means some of your stocks will win, and others, not so much.

This volatility makes stock markets more risky than banks. Bank savers typically don’t have to worry about fluctuations in the value of their deposits.

As for the entrepreneurial side, the stock market is a key institution encouraging new businesses. For a founder, the payoff typically comes during the IPO. An IPO allows founders to sell some of their ownership (in a now more-valuable company) so they can diversify their own holdings.

Next time, we’ll look at the third kind of intermediary: bond markets.

August 19, 2017

Pricing electricity generated by wind versus more traditional sources

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Australia’s Catellaxy Files responds to a series of misleading pro-wind statements by pointing to the appropriate method of calculating electricity costs:

The first thing to understand – which The Conversation does not – is that electricity is not like pairs of shoes that can be sold at the same price tomorrow as today. The product consumers demand is not a quantity of megawatt hours but the continuous supply of electricity – its permanent availability to them in whatever quantity they require. This necessity for continuous supply places a premium on “despatchable” power from fossil-fuel, nuclear or hydro plants. This type of power is more valuable than power that cannot be controlled (wind, solar), and much more valuable than power that cannot even be predicted (especially wind). Moreover, power that is rapidly despatchable (hydro, some gas turbines) in response to sudden surges in demand or unexpected failures at other plants is more valuable still for its ability to plug gaps at short notice.

These differences in the value of different types of electricity already render The Conversation’s comparison of coal and wind power per megawatt hour useless. And rectifying its analysis is not, as pretended, just a matter of adding in “balancing costs” such as additional rapidly despatchable sources, extra storage capacity, or upgraded transmission equipment. For the insertion of a low-quality, unreliable source into the grid also reduces the efficiency and increases the cost of baseload power from coal or other sources which need to operate continuously to be efficient.

This leads to a second major unappreciated fact, which is that suppliers do not make economic decisions based on costs. Instead they make decisions based on the estimated difference between costs and revenue. If wind power can underbid baseload coal whenever the wind is blowing, existing coal stations won’t start up, and new ones won’t be built, because they cannot operate efficiently being turned on and off all the time, and therefore cannot generate enough revenue to justify operation or construction as the case may be. This in turn leads to a higher and higher percentage of unreliable power in the mix, with eventual blackouts.

The only way of assessing the true cost of wind and solar is to look at the overall electricity price before and after renewables are added to the mix. Once you do that you find overwhelming evidence from all over the world that markets with even modest shares of power from intermittent renewables have considerably higher prices than those without. That this is not a coincidence is confirmed by both the tightness of the correlation, and the equally impressive correlations over time within the same market – as the share of renewables increases, the price of electricity goes up, and it goes up very sharply with even 20-30% of nameplate capacity, or 5-10% of energy output, sourced from wind.

Although the discussion is about Australia’s wind power experiment, the details are also relevant to Ontario, as a recent study pointed out:

Electricity prices in Ontario have increased dramatically since 2008 based on a variety of comparative measures. Ontario’s electricity prices have risen by 71 percent from 2008 to 2016, far outpacing electricity price growth in other provinces, income, and inflation. During this period, the average growth in electricity prices across Canada was 34 percent.

Ontario’s electricity price change between 2015 and 2016 alone is also substantial: the province experienced a 15 percent increase in one year. This was two-and-a-half times greater than the national average of 6 percent during the same period.

From 2008 to 2015, electricity prices also increased two-and-a-half times faster than household disposable income in Ontario. In particular, the growth in electricity prices was almost four times greater than inflation and over four-and-a-half times the growth of Ontario’s economy (real GDP).

The large electricity price increases in Ontario have also translated to significant increases in monthly residential electricity bills. Between 2010 and 2016, monthly electricity bills (including tax) in major Canadian cities increased by an average of $37.68. During the same period, electricity bills in Toronto and Ottawa increased by $77.09 and $66.96, respectively. This means that residents in Toronto experienced electricity price increases of double the national average between 2010 and 2016.

In Toronto and Ottawa, the average monthly bills for residential consumers including taxes in 2016 were $201 and $183, respectively.

Much of the reason for Ontario’s much-higher-than-average electricity costs are the provincial government’s dodgy crony capitalist methods for increasing alternative energy sources in the power mix:

The problem of skyrocketing electricity prices and high bills is a made-in-Ontario problem directly tied to the provincial government’s policy choices. Ontario’s policies around renewable energy (wind, solar, and biomass) have resulted in large additional costs for consumers. More specifically, Ontario’s high electricity prices can be attributed to poorly structured long term contracts, the phase-out of coal energy, and a growing electricity supply and demand imbalance in the province that is resulting in Ontario exporting electricity at a loss.

August 18, 2017

What Do Banks Do?

Filed under: Business, Economics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 28 Jun 2016

This week: Dive deeper into one type of financial intermediary: Banks.

Next week: Sticking with macroeconomics, we’ll take a look at the next intermediary: Stock Markets.

Some people want to save and invest, others want to borrow. Sometimes, savers and borrowers link up directly. But most times, they don’t know each other. So they rely on institutions that bridge them together. These bridges are called financial intermediaries, and this video will show you one kind—banks.

How do banks operate?

On the savings side, they attract depositors by paying interest on deposits. On the borrowing side, banks make loans, for which they charge interest. The key to a bank’s profit is in charging a higher interest for loans than the interest paid out to depositors. Of course, to make sure that loans are as productive as possible, banks have specialized staff and systems for evaluating loan applications.

That sort of due diligence, and specialization is central to what a bank does. Not only does a bank coordinate the savings of many, but it also undertakes the task of studying borrowers in order to determine the most qualified. And then, to further minimize risk, a bank will spread its money out across a whole portfolio of loans. Thus, if one loan goes bad, the bank won’t go bankrupt.

In this way, you can see how banks provide valuable services—they allow you to earn interest on your savings, while also turning those savings into loans, which help economic growth.

Notice though, that as a depositor, your savings won’t just rest in a vault. But then, what happens when you decide to make a withdrawal? Banks account for that by having reserves. Banks keep an eye on their reserves so they can cover the withdrawals of various depositors. Predictably, problems arise, when there aren’t enough reserves to cover withdrawals. In the words of our previous video, that’s one kind of failed intermediation.

In the next video, we’ll look at a different kind of intermediary — stock markets.

There, we’ll show you how stock markets turn savings into investment. Hang tight, and see you then!

August 17, 2017

Words & Numbers: The Illusion of School Choice

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Published on 16 Aug 2017

In private schools, as in private enterprise in general, poor performance drives funding away by driving paying customers away. Yet in public schools, poor performance is used as an excuse for increased funding. With incentives like these, is it any wonder that public schools are failing our children so badly? Isn’t it time to inject some competition into the system?

Education for all is a worthy wish. So is food for all. But we don’t force poor people to eat state-produced food. Even food stamp recipients get to choose where to shop. Why shouldn’t beneficiaries of public education spending get to choose where to send their kids?

Our hosts James R. Harrigan and Antony Davies want to know…

The Most Important Invention You Never Thought About

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 26 Jul 2017

One entrepreneur’s invention cut world poverty and revolutionized manufacturing. Learn more with Steve Davies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QLoeehMw0w&list=PL-erRSWG3IoBe1BsaqgTwYx0nS4nl2m_N&index=2

LEARN MORE:
How to Sabotage Progress (video): During the earliest part of the Industrial Revolution, workers worried about losing their jobs to machinery would throw their shoes into the machines in order to sabotage production. We’re seeing recurrence of sabotage again today, but there’s no more successful saboteur than regulation. Duke University Professor Michael C. Munger explains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0nSiwnbv4o

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (book): Economist Marc Levinson delves into the history of the shipping container and how the invention changed the world. https://www.amazon.ca/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/0691170819/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1502034038&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Box:+How+the+Shipping+Container&linkCode=ll1&tag=quotulatiousn-20&linkId=ca8f280248e61c2c42aaae2b3c5f1395

An Awesome Map of World Trade and Shipping (article): Daniel Bier uses UCL Energy Institute’s timelapse of global shipping to illustrate spontaneous order. https://fee.org/articles/an-awesome-map-of-world-trade-and-shipping/

TRANSCRIPT:
For a full transcript please visit: http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/the-most-importa%E2%80%A6er-thought-about/

August 13, 2017

Saving and Borrowing

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 21 Jun 2016

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and signaled the start of the Great Recession. One key cause of that recession was a failure of financial intermediaries, or, the institutions that link different kinds of savers to borrowers.

We’ll get to intermediaries in the next video, but for now, we’ll first look at the market intermediaries are involved in.

This market is the combination of savers and borrowers — what we call the “market for loanable funds.”

To start, we’ll represent the market, using two curves you know well—supply and demand. The quantity supplied in the market comes from savings, and the quantity demanded comes from loans. But as you know, we have to factor in price. In the case of the market for loanable funds, the price is the current interest rate.

What happens to the supply of savings when the interest rate goes up? When are borrowers compelled to borrow more? Or less? We’ll cover these scenarios in this video.

One quick note: there’s not really one unified market for loanable funds. Instead, there are many small markets, with different sorts of lenders, lending to different sorts of borrowers. As we said in the beginning, it’s financial intermediaries, like banks, bond markets, and stock markets, which link these different sides of the market.

We’ll get a better understanding of these intermediaries in our next video, so stay tuned!

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