This week’s Economist reports the results of pilot projects in two rural areas of Tanzania where health aid dollars were allocated, and treatment and intervention strategies developed on the basis of what health problems facing the people in the districts. Treatment and prevention strategies started with low cost methods with great returns, such as insectide [...]
Lynne Kiesling teaches economics at Northwestern. Her weblog has carried many links on auctions, market design, and energy economics. Worth a read if you’re into any of these areas. an aside: A couple of weeks ago someone asked me “why do you need mechanism design, if, after all, markets take care of themselves?” A reason [...]
Thursday I met with acquaintances to talk about math. The organizer, T., introduced Newcomb’s Problem: You are at a Web conference, Tim Berners-Lee is giving the keynote when, a Grey from Zeta Reticula appears in a flash of light. The alien has two boxes. One is transparent. The other is black. You know that Greys [...]
Forget flight crews, the people who need to pack iron are the bookkeepers. So I’ve been playing with the germ of a TV series (as an exercise in learning Tinderbox), I think the government agent character is going to morph into a pistol packing forensic accountant…
Calvin Trillin considers the dillemma posed by the Estate Tax for a certain class of person dead set against paying taxes. “Well, it’s this year or never. Look, under the provisions of the original law, the exemption has been raised and the rates lowered every year for the past nine years. It would have been [...]
The US print edition of The Economist did not have the article on Weblogs which Dave mentioned on Scripting News. But the cover editorial is worth a read, I’m glad to see the editors arguing for the phasing out of coal. It’s a major source of CO2, coal dust and smoke is a health hazard, [...]
[ via Arnold Kling ] Cal Berkeley (by way of Michigan) microeconomics guru Hal Varian reviews some recent uses of DRM, such as phones which won’t work unless you buy the right brand of battery, or printers that shut down if you refill the inkjet cartridge, and worries how this will affect us poor saps [...]
Over at Lean Left, Kevin Raybould worries about the supply of schools after the Voucher decision by the Supremes: The problem, as I see it, is that the program was alleged to have a structure that makes it very next to impossible to attend anything other than a Catholic school. Some say that was the [...]
[ via numerous sources ] Noted with glee: This morning, the outlaws bought the city of Waco, transferred its underperforming areas to a private partnership, and sent a bill to California for $4.5 billion. Forget the flap over the Pledge and prayer in schools, we ought to introduce manditory accounting classes.
Here’s a lession in microeconomics: Microsoft’s Palladium. It strikes me as Redmond’s next attempt to do an AT&T on computing — “Please regulate me, for I am a monopoly, I propagate viruses, and I encourage teenagers to copy Britney without paying for the privilege, but, *hem* you must forbid in law any competition.”
My old boss from UW Madison, Joel Rogers, and Richard Freeman propose a new approach to an old form of Union organizing. In the early days of American Labor, union membership was offered to any “wage worker”. You didn’t have to be an employee of a shop with a union contract. Union members may not [...]
Charlie Stross wrote a great response to Eric Raymond’s doctrinare reaction to Ken MacLeod and Ian M. Bank’s socialist space operas.
The Chicago Climate Exchange was mentioned on the Earth Day edition of KQED’s Forum program today. It’s an experimental market, focused on the midwestern US, for trading rights to emit carbon. The participants are energy, industrial, and resource companies. Emissions trading seems straightforward in practice, but, considering that you and I dump carbon into the [...]
Wow, this is one from the referer logs. I just discovered that the GPL’ed source for this WebLog has been adapted by a member of the Indian Parliament, Suresh Prabhu, the Union Minister for Power, to run a catalog of development projects. Pretty cool, and kinda flattering. And just goes to show you how this [...]
Add Professor J. Bradford DeLong to the list of economists who write for general audiences, and are interesting reading.