DISQUS

Once you open the pandora's box of strings-attached to tax-payer funded research, you'll never get out of it. Question: what if some crucial research will only be pursued by people who are confident that they can keep their findings secret?

Microsoft subsidizes basic research too.

Also, no one invented the internet as we know it today: it's the result of the aggregate effort of generations of people who have incrementally improved or just provided feed-back that enabled the evolution to arrive at what we have today.

Will,

do you really think that your personal predispositions (more liberal vs. more conservative) should influence in any way how you should behave vis-a-vis larger societal phenomena?
What I mean is that Hayek famously warned that we must have two essentially unrelated outlooks (small-scale/large-scale), so it's possible that when talking about large-scale politics the traditional categories break-down and we don't even know what the right attitudes should actually be.

The reality is that Republicans think A and when in power do B, while Democrats think C and when in power do B. Libertarians are generally against B. What we need is a substantial presence of libertarians in both parties, so that when in power there is an internal narrative that advises against doing B.

Will,

have you read the somewhat positive review in The Freeman? Here (scroll down to the second item)

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/departments/boo...

The argument is not that we don't want any regulation. The argument is that centrally-planned regulation crowds out spontaneously emergent organically grown regulation that evolves over time and is tend to and respected. As an example take Prop 8 in Ca, where free individual decided to sign private contracts and where able to find judges to recognize those contracts. The process had evolved step-by-step and the in one swoop the voters decided that all those marriages had to be banned. I don't see why liberals could agree with this point of view.

That was fun!

Sounds like Daly never read the "I pencil" story...

Will,

this is off topic since you haven't made a post about the latest FreeWill (but it has a Caplan connection). At one point you said that it was great that Obama seems to be reducing executive power. But wouldn't that just transfer more power to the Congress? And if Caplan's model is correct, wouldn't that give even more power to the median voter? After all Obama is now everybody's president, while congresspeople are opinion-poll addicts constantly campaigning.

"We need better government". That's pretty clear.

But if you say "we need better politicians", then I disagree.

The problem is that better government can only be gotten via better politicians.....

So when faced with this conundrum we can go two ways: either we romanticize the political process and raise it above any particular goal that may be pursued (democratic fundamentalism), or we cynically slam the political process at every turn and hope that more light will shine on our beautiful ideals.

Go Will!

And I hope you'll keep your show accessible to us ignoramuses.

You alluded to potential paradoxes. Here is one possibility. You estimate the percentage of people who know what they're doing at 20-30%. This means that politicians cater mainly to the views of the remaining 70%. So the enlightened 20% realizes this and doesn't know who to vote for. So in fact the 20% who knows what they're doing doesn't know what to do.

Muirgeo,

Imposing the minimum-wage on slave-owners is a good thing because they'll try to get rid of some slaves and the price of slaves goes down making them less of a valuable investment. On the other hand, imposing a minimum-wage on employers in the free market is not a good thing because they'll get rid of some of their workers. The difference is that workers want to work (do not want to be fired), while slaves don't want to be slaves (want to be fired).

Ashish,

forcing slave-owners to provide air-conditioning to their slaves is a good thing because it reduces the return on the slave-owner's investment. On the other hand, forcing employers to provide air-conditioning, means that the workers will take a pay-cut proportional to the cost of the new unit. The difference is that slaves don't get anything to start with, while workers appreciate all the money they can get and don't like third parties to decide for them if they should get wages in the form of air-conditioning or fire-escapes or other.

Also divorce rates are pretty high and it could be that couples that are heading towards divorce with kids have a rougher time than couples in a similar situation without kids. However, it seems hard to control for this because you'd have to compare couple that will never divorce but this is not a "stopping time" (probability jargon).

Could there be problems with averages? For instance, could there people that are happy with kids and unhappy without, while other people are happy without and unhappy with kids and then somehow because of the ratio between people with kids and people without, that skews the analysis? I'm just trying wiggle out of the unintuitive result.

What do you think is the reason for that gap between compensation and productivity? Is it probably just the increase in benefit compensation (health insurance and all that?)

I've enjoyed the diavlog. I have two comments and a funny thought.

First, I got the impression that Kerry thinks that fertility politics is all about telling women what to do. However, raising a family, especially with 2+ kids, is definitely a two-parents job.

Second, retired people were mentioned as a united voting block that has become alien to the economic dynamics of a society. I'm sure there's some of that, but they still need people to mow their lawns, to cook for them, to nurse them, etc....so if anything, old people should me even more aware of the benefits of immigration.

Lastly, the funny thought. Throughout the broadcast I was imagining screaming kids in the background, running after each other, arguing repetitively "It's mine! No mine! No mine!", crashing sounds, etc....with Will and Kerry trying hard to maintain their composure :-)

I've heard that at 40 you're already too old to adopt and it gets extremely difficult to do. Also, raising kids takes energy and at 40 you instead want to relax.

I also felt uncomfortable with some of his arguments that almost seemed borderline pop-psychology. I understand the creativity in trying to find special cases that don't seem (at first glance) to conform with a well-established theory, but to claim a whole new field (behavioral economics) one needs to advance a whole new set of axioms.