Adam Ozimek wrote a piece titled “Can Regulation Create Good Jobs?” The jumping off point for the piece is the recent slate of discussion around Jimmy John’s requiring its employees to sign noncompete clauses:
The latest of these [stories] involves a sandwich chain that allegedly asked its line workers to sign noncompete agreements. [...]
The IGM Forum asked economists to agree or disagree with this statement purportedly sourced from Piketty:
The most powerful force pushing towards greater wealth inequality in the US since the 1970s is the gap between the after-tax return on capital and the economic growth rate.
This question is getting at whether “r > [...]
Via @gojomo, I was directed to this article and video about a property rights dispute at a San Francisco public soccer field. As @gojomo points out, the property rights dispute mirrors some of the points I made many months ago about pick-up basketball and Grab-What-You-Can World.
On one [...]
One of the weird things people emphasize when tuition subsidies and the like are brought up is that such things don’t even cover the full “cost” of attending. This is because, they explain, students’ housing and food and other miscellaneous expenses cost a good deal of money and tuition subsidies don’t reach those things. The [...]
I’ve never seen someone get as thumped as Sumner in this weird exchange (him, me, him, me, him). It’s gotten a bit complicated now, as he’s shifted his position so many times. So it’s probably easiest to start with the certain victories.
First, Sumner has [...]
Earlier, I responded to Scott Sumner’s rather strange armchair attempt to act like my standard form of poverty statistical analysis was off. It wasn’t and still isn’t. After posting my response, Sumner has another really bizarre post about the topic, which I will address here.
Like the first post, this new [...]
I am not really sure what Scott Sumner is all about these days. Many years ago, he was like “monetary policy should utilize an NGDP target” and people were like “that’s an interesting thought.” But now, he’s kind of gone into mission creep mode where he comments on things that he’s not so [...]
Sarah Kendzior is a liar. But this is old news, with the Jacobinghazi affair perhaps the most high-profile example thus far. I toyed with a piece going through a history of her unhinged deception, but instead I think it’d be more interesting to keep things simple.
So here is a fun [...]
In a review on The New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
Perhaps more importantly, I am less than convinced by Alexander’s rendition of white supremacy as a means of cleaving poor whites away from blacks. My view on this is that white supremacy is an interest in and of itself. It’s not clear [...]
I have been pointing out recently that defenders of laissez-faire capitalism shift between philosophical frameworks when they are arguing, something I call capitalism whack-a-mole. They do this because there are no normative frameworks that justify laissez-faire capitalism and so there is no other way to actually muster an argument in its favor other [...]