Economy
UPDATED ON SEPTEMBER 8 & 9 Incentives drive human behavior but, especially in government where there are no market forces, rarely does anybody pay attention to the impact of the incentives created by laws, regulations or government actions. Which is why government actions will always create “unintended” consequences and less than efficient solutions. There is…
Jeff Jacoby offers an interesting tidbit in today’s Globe: … it’s a quantifiable phenomenon. Scholars call it the “congressional effect” – markets tend to get nervous when Congress is in session, and generally perform better when it isn’t. As economists Michael Ferguson and H. Douglas Witte have shown, the impact this tendency can have is…
Some of you may be familiar with Thomas Barnett for his The Pentagon’s New Map and other books. He also has his own blog on which he’s posted a few thoughts (h/t) on how higher energy prices may affect globalization (inspired by this piece). Up to now, accessing virtually any cheap, reliable labor made sense,…
Time to clean out the “To do” link “attic” I keep handy. So, before they vanish into the ether, here are some that may be interesting to others. Part I: Politics and Economy Obama, Shaman by Michael Knox Beran: Obama-mania is bound in the end to disappoint. Not only does it teach us to despise…
I recently finished reading Peter Navarro’s new book, The Coming China Wars: Where They Will be Fought, How The Can Be Won. The purpose of this book is to warn that unless strong actions are taken now both by China and the rest of the world, The Coming China Wars are destined to be fought…
Believe it or not, I’m not a big fan of class warfare. I’m a blue-collar capitalist, after all. I break my back merely to get by, but I’m deeply suspicious of plans to grant the government authority to redistribute income away from those who are more likely to have their backs massaged than strained. Still,…
CNBC rated the business climate of the 50 states. Well, at least we didn’t get worse…. Interestingly, while RI was pretty static in most categories, there were gains in Workforce and Education (almost into the upper 1/3 in each). Here is CNBC’s description of each category, respectively: Many states point with great pride to the…
If only progressives’ plans were always this straightforward: Statewide Wifi available everywhere to everyone… for free . And let the cable/telephone companies bid on the right to be the State’s sole provider. How would it be paid for? The company winning the bid to provide the service will maintain sole rights to sell advertising space…
A recent post, Lessons for Rhode Island from Silicon Valley: An historical reflection on an actual innovation economy, discussed what made Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture so unique and what some of its economic growth policy lessons are for Rhode Island. In the latest edition of The Weekly Standard, Thomas Hazlett has written about the book,…
Something has seemed forced — in a “just a bit too perfect” way — about the promise of “green jobs” as some sort of savior of our economy. Ben Lieberman suggests that, even if such jobs do proliferate, they don’t match up with the number of jobs lost to the larger ecological zeitgeist: According to…
