I have pointed out a few times over the years that the US has for many years relied on voluntary donations for blood, but on paid donations for blood plasma (for example, see here, here, and here). One result of these divergent incentives is that while I receive information about the need for blood donations now and then, when it comes to blood plasma, the US is a major exporter. My earlier posts on this subject have focused on trying to understand why some kinds of donations seem appropriate for payment, while others are not. But John M Dooley and Emily A Gallagher take a different approach i ..read more

In a world with lots of problems and even more proposed policies to address each of these problems, it makes sense to study the possibilities–and then to prioritize policies with highest estimated ratio of benefits to costs. The Copenhagen Consensus think tank carried out this exercise and came up with 12 policies. A special issue of the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis (Spring 2023 14: S1) has a symposium of 12 open-access papers describing the calculations for each policy. The overview essay by Bjorn Lomborg carries the unwieldy but descriptive title “Save 4.2 Million Lives and Generate $1.1 ..read more

It sometimes feels to me as if issues about energy are all being condensed down into climate change issues. But energy policy debates should have three sides. Michael Greenstone delivered the AEA Distinguished Lecture on “The Economics of the Global Energy Challenge” in San Antonio in January. It’s now published in the AEA Papers and Proceedings (2024, 114: 1-30). As he explains it: “The global energy challenge is defined by three often conflicting goals that all societies are pursuing: inexpensive and reliable energy, clean air, and limiting damages from climate change.” Greenstone empha ..read more

The Columbia University campus, along with many other college campuses, has been convulsed in the last few months by slogan-chanting, banner-waving protests. Thus, I was struck when I ran across an address delivered by Frank Fackenthal, then the president of Columbia, on September 26, 1946, on the occasion of the start of a new academic year. It’s reprinted in The Greater Power and Other Addresses, a collection of speeches from Fackenthal, published in 1949. (I originally ran across part of the quotation that follows in a letter to the editor from Irving Kushner, published Wall Street Journal ..read more

Last week, I posted about the attempt by the Minneapolis City Council to set higher pay for Uber and Lyft drivers, and the threat by the rideshare companies to withdraw from Minneapolis or from Minnesota as a whole if the law was enacted. The dispute seems settled, at least for now, and I thought some readers might like to know the denouement of the story. The governor of Minnesota is a Democrat and the Minnesota state legislature is Democrat-controlled, and thus was ideologically sympathetic to an attempt to raise the wages of rideshare drivers. However, unlike the Minneapolis City Council, t ..read more

The “labor share” refers to the share of income in an economy paid to labor. Back in the dark ages of the late 1970s and early 1980s when I first started studying economics, it was often assumed that the labor share was more-or-less a constant term over decades. But in the last to decades, the labor share has dropped, both for the US economy and across most high-income countries. For some perspective over time, the graph shows a time series of the labor share for the nonfarm business sector of US economy going back to the late 1940s. The vertical axis is set equal to 100 in 2017, which is not ..read more

Back in January, I posted about an article that was getting some attention in my world. Megan T. Stevenson is an active researcher in the criminal-justice-and-economics literature. She argues that when you look at the published studies that use randomized control trial methods to evaluate ways of reducing crime, most of the studies don’t show a meaningful effect, and of those that do show a meaningful effect, the effect often isn’t replicated in follow-up studies. She mulls over this finding in “Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World” (forthcoming in the Boston Universi ..read more

The Minneapolis City Council voted back on March 7 to require that ride-sharing firms like Uber and Lyft needed to increase the pay received by their drivers. Uber and Lyft both responded by saying that they would stop travelling to or from locations in the city of Minneapolis; Uber said that it would leave the state of Minnesota altogether, while Lyft said that it would continue to serve non-Minneapolis destination in the broader metro area. My extended family and I live in suburbs that border Minneapolis, and one of my adult children lives in Minneapolis. The ride-share services are mostly a ..read more

There are three “government-sponsored enterprises,” commonly called GSEs, that play a big role in US housing finance: the Federal Home Loan Banks, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. Perhaps the key similarity across all three is that when they borrow money, the financial markets perceive that the federal government is standing behind the loan–and so they can borrow at a lower interest rate. However, the ways in which the GSEs are organized and interact with housing markets is rather different. Most notably, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were converted to private companies, with shareholders, which then ..read more

The “15-minute city” is getting some attention from urban planners. The idea is that everyone should be able to access the key destinations in their day-to-day life–work, food, schools, recreation–within a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or mass transit ride of their residence. Cars would then be unnecessary for many daily tasks. Most Americans do not live with the experience of a 15-minute city: for example, the average commute to work, typically by car, is about 25 minutes each way. Here, I’ll sidestep the potential environmental or exercise-related benefits, and instead turn to an interview with ..read more