Elephantstrunk

More aggressive but fatuous baiting of Dani Rodrik from Alex Tabarrok.
I was going to point out that Tabarrok can’t decide whether it is Pareto efficiency or creative destruction that makes markets good and that his example of the motor car opens the floodgates but Lee Arnold, Samson and Barkley Rosser do a better job of […]

State pensions for the rich and private pensions for the poor is this season’s pension panacea.
Legal pressure on the government over Equitable Life, the Ombudsman’s report, the FAS and PPF and renewed umbrage over Gordon Brown’s removal of a tax break from still highly favoured pension investment all effectively demand that the government guarantee pension […]

A little while ago I wrote about Tyler Cowen and Jane Galt partly because they were uncritically triumphalist about the US economy. Today the news brings the following headlines:

Eurozone unemployment falls to record low

Dollar slides further on US manufacturing data

Economic Storm Signals

This doesn’t prove anything much but it does make it […]

David Cameron’s Scarman lecture
and the same in html. It can’t be bad news and I find little to disagree with, at least at face value, but it also means that Cameron is not content merely to copy Blair’s policies but will also imitate him in adopting policies previously owned but now neglected by his opposition.
Voting […]

From FT.com / World / UK - Brown to raise duty on 4×4s and air travel
A rise in air passenger duty is also expected to be announced in the wake of the Stern report on climate change, which called for urgent action to tackle global warming. The duty currently ranges from £5 for the shortest […]

Via Mark Thoma, authoritative  and thoughtful comment on biases likely present in the production and publication of empirical economic research from Edward Glaeser. The fuss being made of the JHU report on deaths in Iraq and the paper on distribution of results of significance tests in published papers in the paper cited by Thoma make […]