Economics

Healthcare Incentives

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I've apparently been sitting on this post for a while, so this might be (is quite literally) old news for many out there.  It's an op-ed piece from The New York Times from a few months back on the healthcare legislation (No, this it not about IR).    What caught my eye was at the end of … Read more

Does language change the way we play games?

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A friend posted a link to a list of 20 words that were not directly translatable into the English language. Most of the words appear to come from Altalang.com, a website that focuses on linguistics and understanding. A few highlights include:   Ilunga: Tshiluba (Southwest Congo) – A word famous for its untranslatability, most professional … Read more

Facts and Stuff on the Distributions of Income and Race in America

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Via Andrew Gelman at the Monkey Cage, an article on this recent Gallup poll regarding people's income and their perceptions of income distributions, tax burdens, etc. 

The thrust of the article is that there are some disparities between where people fall in the overall income distribution and their perceptions of how the tax burden should be distributed—Not my normal thing, but interesting nevertheless.

More below…

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Mr. Y. is no Mr. X.

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I've been meaning to say something about this for a while now, but happen to be a little late to the show.  A couple of weeks ago two Marine Corps officers, whom I presume are members of the joint staff, released an article under the pseudonym "Mr. Y.," harkening back to George Kennan's "X" article in Foreign Affairs.  In a nutshell, their article attempts to provide a broad conceptual framework through which America's role in global affairs can be viewed through the next century.  John Norris at FP has some comments on the piece for those who are interested.  I have a few thoughts of my own…

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The Domestic Side of Things

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Clearly I'm trying to make up for a post drought from the past couple of months.  I'll leave the more in-depth commentary to someone who has been following this situation more closely, but it looks like the Wisconsin State Government is experiencing a wheeeeee-bit of a principal-agent problem (via Boing Boing). Wisconsin Police Have Joined … Read more

Quick Post

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So it's been a little while since I've posted here (very busy times these are).  Anyway, I wanted to link to this post by Phil Arena over at his blog.  Phil discusses how his views on various topics related to IR have changed over the past few years.  I agree with a lot of what he has to say on these issues–I think a lot of what IR scholars focus on, to the extent that we're interested in the domestic forces generating foreign policy outcomes, tend to place too much stock in the qualities we typically assume to characterize democracies and autocracies.  I also agree that economic forces play a huge role in shaping the incentives of political actors–particularly the elites that Arena mentions. 

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A Couple of Things…

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Just a quick post on a couple of things:

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No Fee, No Service

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This story is a good example of why certain goods should be public goods and not private goods. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ The rural residents of Obion County, Tennessee do not have a public firefighting service. They do have access to South Fulton's service (a city in the county), but they have to pay a $75 fee to … Read more

Trade Diversion is up for an award, needs your vote.

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Jonathan Dingel (www.tradediversion.net) is up for a substantial scholarship for blogging and, apparently, is the only economics-based blog up for the scholarship.  Given that there are also no other quantitative political science or formal theory blogs available (there are plenty of normative politics blogs, though) and his posts are actually useful academically, I encourage you … Read more