Library of Economics and Liberty

There have been some interesting developments with NPR recently. A long time veteran of the organization, Uri Berliner, wrote an essay lamenting that the organization has gone from and admittingly left-leaning but still rigorous and fair journalistic enterprise to a politically driven monoculture that lets ideology drive its reporting. NPR, he says, no longer facilitates viewpoint diversity or permits any dissenting voices – leading NPR in turn to suspend Berliner after he voiced his dissent. Berliner resigned shortly thereafter. Читать дальше...

California has some of the strictest insurance regulations in the country. It is the only state where insurers are not allowed to base their rate hikes on catastrophe models — forward-looking calculations of risk — or the rising cost of reinsurance premiums, according to both Zimmerman and the Department of Insurance.

Serious arguments, economic and moral, exist to justify the state (the central and sovereign apparatus of government). Serious objections to these arguments also exist. It is interesting to note that most people, including most economists, ignore both kinds.

Wisconsin comedian Charlie Berens has a great routine about 4-way stops in the Midwest. Midwest drivers are so nice and obsequious that they’ll endlessly wave the other guy on at the stop sign, even when they were there first and have the right-of-way. Like all good comedy, it’s funny because it’s at least a little bit true. As a small-town Midwesterner, I can vouch for the authenticity of the joke. In the past month I have had three separate Midwest stop sign incidents, in which the other driver... Читать дальше...

Political and moral philosophy are related to economics, and even less stealthily to the older political economy. The economist cannot recommend a government policy without making or accepting a value judgment consistent with who is going to be helped and who will be harmed. At least, he must agree that the policy falls within the ethically acceptable functions of government.

The Financial Times has an interesting interview with Esther Duflo, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019. She argues that developed nations have a moral duty to compensate poor countries for the damage done by carbon emissions:

It seems obvious that moral artificial intelligence would be better than the alternative. Can we make AI’s values align with ours, and would we want to? This is the question underlying this conversation between EconTalk host Russ Roberts and psychologist Paul Bloom.

Thomas Sowell frequently emphasizes the importance of thinking beyond the immediate and obvious impact of some economic policy and thinking through the larger implications. He actually wrote an entire book dedicated to this idea – Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One. A similar and useful exercise to evaluate an idea is to really try to work out not what will unfold next, but what that idea, if true, should imply for the present situation. Here are two common examples where this would come in handy. Читать дальше...

A commenter on a recent Pierre Lemieux post wrote:

The only shot Trump has (and had) at the Presidency is due to the arcane system used in America to elect Presidents (why not use direct presidential elections like the rest of the world? … it is so much clearer and easy to understand! … even France abandoned electoral colleges in 1962!!)

The commenter could be right about the presidency of other countries. I don’t know enough to know.

But if he extends it to Prime Ministers, he’s wrong. Читать дальше...

Would an AI simulation of your dead loved one be a blessing or an abomination? And if you knew that after your own death, your loved ones would create a simulation of you, how would that knowledge change the way you choose to live today? These are some of the questions psychologist Paul Bloom discusses with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts as we stand on the threshold of digital immortality.