Welfare economics

July 29, 2016

Economic and religious implications of the DNC platform

Earlier this week, I talked about the religious and economic implications of the RNC platform. As the DNC wraps up, it is time to examine the relevant points of the Democratic platform. Continue Reading...

April 15, 2016

A Policy Solution to Fix Inequality and Boost GDP

Andrew Biggs of AEI has a piece up today at Forbes addressing the gender pay gap and provides a neat solution: “forbid women from staying at home with their children.” As Biggs points out, such a policy would address perhaps the greatest root cause of gender pay inequality: varied work experience attributable to choices women make. Continue Reading...

December 02, 2014

I’m a Giant in Japan. Or, Why Income Inequality is Irrelevant

For most of my life I was, at 5-foot-10, of exactly average height. But in the span of one day in 1989 I became freakishly tall. While I hadn’t grown an inch upward, I had moved 6,000 miles eastward to Okinawa, Japan. Continue Reading...

September 27, 2013

Surplus = Happiness, Deficit = Misery

Joe Carter points to a Lifehacker article that sums up two basic equations that lead to the creation of wealth (with what I consider to be a clarifying correction applied in the first formula): Income spending = surplus Surplus x time = wealth Likewise, Wilhelm Röpke, in his A Humane Economy, points to two equations arising from classical literature that connect surplus with happiness and deficit to misery (the Micawber Principle). Continue Reading...

May 02, 2012

From Christian Giving to the Welfare State in the Netherlands

I recently came across an interesting academic journal, Diaconia: Journal for the Study of Christian Social Practice. One of the sample articles available is by Herman Noordegraaf of the Protestant Theological University in Leiden. Continue Reading...

January 20, 2011

What Indians and Chinese make of their tycoons

An interesting report in The Economist on the rise of flashy and free spending entrepreneur “gazillionaires” in India and China and how they are perceived: In much of India, life is getting perceptibly better each year. Continue Reading...