In all the discussion of Leif Wenar’s critique of Effective Altruism , I haven’t seen much mention of the central premise: that development aid is generally counterproductive (unless, perhaps, it’s delivered by wealthy surfers in their spare time). Wenar is quite clear that his argument applies just as much to official development aid and to the long-standing efforts of NGOs as to projects supported by EA. He quotes burned-out aid workers “hoping their projects were doing more good than harm.” Wenar provides some examples of unintended consequences. For example, bednets provided to fight are s ..read more

My latest in Crikey Peter Dutton (Image: AAP/Diego Fedele) Peter Dutton can’t seem to take a trick on nuclear power. Any option he puts forward seems to vanish as soon as he makes a commitment. Since Dutton became opposition leader, he’s pushed the idea of small modular reactors (SMRs). At least in their original concept, these were reactors small enough (say 50-to-70MW capacity) to be built in a factory and shipped to sites where they could be installed in whatever number was required. The leading candidate was NuScale, a US firm that had contracted with a group of utilities in Utah to develo ..read more

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here ..read more

That’s what the Bible (or at least, the preacher in Ecclesiastes) says, and sometimes I feel as if that’s right. But right now, I’m basking in the glow of having returned final proofs for Public Policy and Climate Change: Politics, Philosophy and Economics, a text to appear in the Lecture Notes in Economics and Policy series put out by World Scientific Publishers. As well as approving the proofs, I produced an index, using a program with the self-explanatory title PDF Index Generator (this is different from the index function in Acrobat, which indexes every word for search purposes). As with ..read more

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here ..read more

Daniel Kahneman, who was, along with Elinor Ostrom, one of the very few non-economists to win the Economics Nobel award, has died aged 90. There are lots of obituaries out there, so I won’t try to summarise his work. Rather, I’ll talk about how it influenced my own academic career. When I was an undergraduate, in the late 1970s, economic analysis of decisions under uncertainty was dominated by the expected utility (EU) theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern. The mean-variance approach, still popular in finance, was regarded as, at best, a special case of the correct EU theory. Some early theore ..read more

Elections over the last week have seen some pretty good outcomes for the Greens and some very bad outcomes for both Labor and the LNP. Here’s what ChatGPT came up when I asked for a representation of Green Labor In the Brisbane Council elections, the Greens got 23.1 per cent of the vote, barely behind Labor on 26.9. The combined total of exactly 50 per cent wasn’t reflected in terms of seats, mainly because of preference leakage and exhaustion, but I want to focus on the longer term implications here. In Tasmania, the incumbent Liberals suffered a 12 per cent swing on primary votes, falling t ..read more

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here ..read more

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here ..read more

Andrew Leigh’s The Shortest History of Economics is the latest in a series of such histories, mostly focused on particular countries. It begins with a striking mini-history of household lighting, focusing on the amount of labour required to produce the light now given off by a standard lightbulb: 58 hours for a wood fire, five hours for a candle based on animal fat, a few minutes for an early electric lightbulb, and less than one second for a modern light-emitting diode. The Shortest History of Economics – Andrew Leigh (Black Inc.) Importantly, what is true of labour hours is also true of mate ..read more