I’ve never tried this before, but I thought I would try to come up with what I think of as my top 10 EconLog posts in 2024. I got it whittled down to 15 and then made some somewhat arbitrary exclusions.
Here they are. In all but one instance, I give an excerpt.
The Wall Street Journal’s Misleading Subhead About Oil Companies
November 23, 2024.
When I wrote this, I was working from the electronic version of the Wall Street Journal because my print version comes with a lag. I had no idea that this was the front-page article when I wrote my critique, a fact that makes me glad that I wrote it. Its prominence on the page makes it an even bigger deal than I had thought.
Should You Be a College Professor?
November 18, 2024.
Excerpt:
Even if the vast majority of colleges and universities are beyond salvation, that doesn’t mean all colleges are. And it doesn’t mean that even those beyond salvation can’t have nice niches.
October 29, 2024.
Excerpt:
Tom was one of the early advocates of deregulation. At a forum on inflation held by President Ford in 1974, Tom circulated a statement calling for deregulation of transportation, airlines, energy, and a number of other sectors. (I’m going by memory here. The copy he gave me was destroyed in my 2007 office fire.) As I recall, he got the vast majority of economists, a group that included many Democrats as well as Republicans, to sign the statement.
Are Sex Workers Necessarily Engaged in Trafficking?
October 14, 2024.
Excerpt:
Note the disgusting irony. We are told to look out for sex traffickers because that will reduce the number of people forced into prostitution. But if we cooperate, we might well be helping the police use force against innocent non-coercive people.
NBA Players’ Average Height and Canada’s Fall in Real GDP Per Capita
October 8, 2024.
Excerpt:
But here’s a back-of-the-envelope attempt. The number of NPRs in Canada rose from 3.5% of the population in 2022 to 6.5% by January 2024. That’s a 3.0 percentage point increase. Because these NPRs were disproportionately students and because the ones employed were disproportionately in low-productivity jobs, a generous assumption, I believe, is that they raised GDP by 1.0% over those 2 years. So if, all else equal, the numerator, GDP, rises by 1.0% and the denominator, the number of people, rises by 3.0%, GDP per capita will fall by 2.0%. In short, these non-permanent residents bring down GDP per capita. But the rest of Canada could be experiencing an increase in GDP per person.
Subsidies to the Press Endanger Free Speech
September 12, 2024.
Excerpt:
Freedom of the press in Canada is dying. And, as Noormohamed’s threatening tweet points out, silencing critics of the government is one of the main purposes of government subsidies.
Bryan Caplan Understates Case for Immigration
August 21, 2024.
Excerpt:
With all its imperfections and government barriers, America still has one of the most vital dynamic economies in the world. Potential inventors here have others near them to work with: think Silicon Valley. So if the government had prevented a substantial number of them from immigrating, it would have prevented a substantial amount of innovation, and American consumers, along with other consumers, would have been deprived of gains from innovation.
April 16, 2024.
Excerpt:
So why do they refer to immigrants as “military-age males?” I think it’s to subtly plant in the listeners’ minds the fear that a hostile foreign government is sending these males here to help them take over or at least somehow undercut American society.
Could a substantial percent of these military-age males be actual military personnel, but in disguise? Sure, they could. But it seems unlikely.
Occam’s Razor applies here.
The more-likely explanation is that they want to get the hell out of the country they’re from because this country (the United States) is so much less oppressive and so much better in other ways. In fact, it wouldn’t be totally surprising if some of those military-age males were fleeing conscription. That was a strong motivator for their counterparts who came here between 100 and 150 years ago.
Pregnancy Discrimination Act Reduces Women’s Economic Freedom
April 12, 2024.
Excerpt:
Whenever the government interferes with contracts between employers and employees, it reduces the freedom of both sides. Take the PDA. One can certainly imagine a married women who would want the freedom to contract with an employer who doesn’t offer a pregnancy benefit. Why? The most obvious reason is that she might not want to get pregnant. The benefit, then, would appear to be of no value to her. But it’s worse than that. Although the benefit is of no value, there is a cost. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and employers, if forced to offer this benefit, will figure out ways to reduce pay (either in dollars or in other benefits) for women, especially married women, of child-bearing age.
How Timur Kuran Changed My Thinking
January 13, 2024.
Excerpt:
Rarely do I leave a conference thinking hard about an idea I just heard. But his paper stuck with me. It helped resolve an issue that I had been thinking about for a couple of decades.
The issue was this: why does the adult world seem more like high school than I had expected when I was in high school?
Even when I was very young, I was not very hesitant to state my views. But in high school, I noticed that there could be strong social sanctions against me (fortunately, short of threatening my life, which happened only once) if I stated unpopular views.
Note: The accompanying pic is of Timur Kuran.
