Economics

The Slow Hunch: A More Perfect Union?

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Nearly two years ago, I graduated from UNT with a BBA in Organizational Behavior & Human Resource Management. As part of my curriculum, I did an internship at a unionized freight company. I was required to write a research paper based on my experience and the company itself. Having dealt with grievances, discipline, and other administrative duties, I focused on the effect the union had the company’s operations. I posted an excerpt of that paper at The Slow Hunch (I left out the company specifics and focused on the overall economic effect). Even though I’ve become softer on unions and harder on management over the past couple years (despite the unsavory history of labor unions and their contribution to unemployment), I still think the post is worth a look. If anything, it is a good reminder of a point I’ve made before: true growth comes from capital investment, creation of wealth, technological advances, increased skill and education, and competition.

Pic from Mark Perry

 

Why Vote? Society as Emergent Property, Part 1

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2013-08-29 The Ethics of Voting

When economists look at voting, they usually say that the benefit from voting is the probability that your vote will be the deciding vote in an election. Since no major political election in American history has been decided by one vote–or even by anything close to one vote–this means that the effective benefit of voting is basically zero.

And yet people vote. What’s more, we have an idea that people ought to vote, and that they probably should try to be moderately informed about it, too.

Jason Brennan is one philosopher who feels quite differently. His argument, in The Ethics of Voting, is that there’s no real civic duty to vote. If you’re uninformed, he argues, then your vote does more harm than good. And instead of spending the effort to become informed, why not spend the effort on some other socially beneficial activity? Start a business, found a charity, volunteer somewhere: but skip the voting.

Here’s the problem with that analysis, however. The term “more informed” is, by definition, relative. So if we say that only the most informed 50% of the electorate should vote (morally speaking, I’m not suggesting any kind of law or policy to disenfranchise ignorant people here), why stop there? Now instead of 200,000,000 voters you have 100,000,000 voters, but 50% of them are smarter than the other 50%, so shouldn’t we reduce the number again, to 50,000,000? The point is that there’s no good reason to ever stop this winnowing process until we end up with a world where only a handful of super-geniuses are voting and the rest of us are just sitting on the sidelines. 

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Which Famous Economist Are You Like?

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This survey uses an interesting definition of “famous” since I had never heard of the economists I was most similar to: Judith Chevalier, Pete Klenow, and Luigi Zingales. At least Zingales has his own Wikipedia page.

2013-08-23 Luigi Zingales

I liked what I read about him, but as I answered more questions about the EU (which I know very little about) I drifted away from him and towards Klenow / Chevalier, going back and forth several times before ending up nearest to Klenow.

2013-08-23 Survey Results

 

Who do you end up closest to?