Suchergebnisse

Specificity, fertility, and political assimilation. Fourth in a series of guest-blogging posts.

Checking the credibility of Hsieh-Moretti the lazy way. Third in a series of guest-blogging posts.

Privatization of federal and state land is a massive missed opportunity. Second in a series of guest-blogging posts.

Why *Build, Baby, Build* should be a top libertarian priority. First in a series of guest-blogging posts.

To be clear, housing prices probably aren't the main cause of falling fertility. I put more blame on laborious parenting philosophies, intermediate foresight, and absurd credential inflation. But cheaper housing would almost surely help, and freeing housing markets is the best known way to make housing cheap.

People in the past were right to believe that the future could easily outshine the past. Why shouldn't we believe the same?

Housing deregulation isn't just one sort of poverty policy. It is the best sort of poverty policy. Instead of letting government tax the rest of society and hoping that the benefits exceed the costs, housing deregulation shows government a mirror. "You're not the hero of this story. At best, you can become a repentant villain. Want to help the poor? Then stop hurting them."

The same lesson holds for so many of forms of housing regulation. Today's governments strictly regulate skyscrapers. But the beloved skyline of New York City was largely built under near‐​laissez‐​faire conditions. Today's governments strictly protect historic buildings.

The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand. Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisel

Contrary to my critics, voter irrationality does not imply that economists cannot mitigate political failure. With rational voters, reform-minded economists have few viable tactics; with irrational voters reformers have more options. Rational voters can be swayed only by facts and logic; irrational voters could respond to better rhetoric. Rational voters strategically punish those who ignore their policy preferences; irrational voters use less effective disciplinary strategies that create political slack. Even with irrational voters, efficiency-enhancing reform is hard. With rational voters, however, democracy's failure to adopt a reform is strong evidence that the reform does not enhance efficiency. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractA surprising conclusion of modern political economy is that democracies with highly ignorant voters can still deliver very good results as long as voters' errors balance each other out. This result is known as the Miracle of Aggregation. This paper begins by reviewing a large body of evidence against this Miracle. Empirically, voters' errors tend to be systematic; they compound rather than cancel. Furthermore, since most citizens vote for the policies theybelieveare best for society, systematic errors lead voters to support socially suboptimal policies. The paper then considers the case for "paternalistically" vetoing popular but misguided democratic decisions, presenting several arguments that overruling democratic decisions is much less objectionable than overruling individual decisions. In fact, since democracies routinely adopt paternalistic policies, the opponent of paternalism for individual decisions should embrace paternalism for democratic decisions. The paper concludes by considering several different mechanisms for improving upon majority rule.