Bryan Caplan on Divorce and Unemployment

Bryan Caplan quotes Louis C.K. in one of his most recent blog posts.

It is one of Bryan's sharpest posts.

SlatStar on My Id on Defensiveness

Here's another great post by the best blogger in town (high praise from both David Friedman and Bryan Caplan) Scott Alexander:

I like discussion, debate, and reasoned criticism. But a lot of arguments aren’t any of those things. They’re the style I describe as ethnic tension, where you try to associate something you don’t like with negative affect so that other people have an instinctive disgust reaction to it.

No Universals?

Though twilight may be long, there is a difference between night and day.

Higher class correlates with charity?

A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior

Across eight studies with large and representative international samples, we predominantly found positive effects of social class on prosociality: Higher class individuals were more likely to make a charitable donation and contribute a higher percentage of their family income to charity (32,090 ≥ N ≥ 3,957; Studies 1–3), were more likely to volunteer (37,136 ≥N ≥ 3,964; Studies 4–6), were more helpful (N = 3,902; Study 7), and were more trusting and trustworthy in an economic game when interacting with a stranger (N = 1,421; Study 8) than lower social class individuals.

If this finding is basically right, it might seem natural to say that money is causing this good behavior. I doubt it for the same reasons I doubt that lack of money causes many of the poor's systematic bad behaviors (like divorce, alcoholism, and single parenthood). Rather, bad behavior generally leads to failure, and good behavior lead leads to success.

Call off the beepocolypse

Call of the beepocolypse, for the love of God...

"As you can see, the number of honeybee colonies has actually risen since 2006, from 2.4 million to 2.7 million in 2014, according to data tracked by the USDA"

Nothing in the article is novel, I wrote this several months ago.

Great Summary of Minimum Wage

Tyler Cowen calls it the best summary of minimum wage he's heard. Minimum Wage Muddle.

Standard economic logic: when you raise the price of something people buy less of it. Raise the price of labor and you'll create disemployment effects; hurting the people you're trying to help.

Then comes empirical work: Card and Krueger can't find disemployment effects after minimum wage is raised in a couple of states. Some other studies find the same thing

Other studies do find disemployment effects. Sometimes quite significant.

Takeaway from the empirical work; measuring disemployment effects is messy business. Also, conditions matter. Obviously the important condition the minimum wage depends on is how far it deviates from the market wage.

The picture we have in our heads of the typical minimum wage earner is mostly false. Minimum wage earners are as likely to be from high income households as low-income households.

The cost of higher pay is (somewhat) passed onto consumers, who are often poor. How much of the cost is an important matter, and disappointingly neglected in the article.

Also, What economic ideas are hard to popularize?

Comparative Advantage is the most popular answer in the comments. It is the first thing that came to my mind.

Tyler Cowen gives tax incidence theory as an answer.