Because my courses focus on public policy, I often discuss benefit-cost analyses (BCA) in them. While little discussed in public, the central idea is simply to identify and include all the relevant benefits and costs of a decision, do our best to estimate their values, then choose the option that provides the greatest net benefits. Hardly a radical idea. It can be useful in disciplining our thinking to be more consistent. Benjamin Franklin employed a version of it in making some of his decisions.

The money supply growth rate rose in December slowed after a November surge of nearly six percent. 

Earlier this month, West Virginia state senator Charles Trump introduced a senate resolution requesting that the citizens of Frederick County consider joining West Virginia. That is, the West Virginia Senate invited the county to secede from Virginia and join West Virginia. The Senate later adopted the resolution.

The eloquent nineteenth-century French economist and liberal Frédéric Bastiat famously noted that what separates a good economist from a bad one is the ability to consider both the seen and the unseen. A bad economist does not recognize the costs down the road, and may thus come to advocate all too costly solutions (as in the commonly used analogy, peeing in one’s pants in the dead of winter to escape the cold—warm at first, followed by freezing).

The realm of politics is to coordinate solutions beyond what decentralized actors and organizations can themselves achieve. This is done through the power of the state (coercion). Thus, the scope and use of politics as a means is strictly limited to where it is the better solution for society and its constituents. 

 The US Senate is increasingly targeted by left-wing think tanks and legislators for the fact it is based on “voter inequality.” According to critics, the Senate ensures small states are “overrepresented,”and the body favors voters in smaller and more sparsely populated states.

In a January 14 article for Vox, Ian Millhiser discusses a new proposal in the Harvard Law Review designed to accomplish four things:

Abstract: Abstract: This paper analyzes Brazil’s 2004–16 business cycle, which subsumes what is now regarded as the nation’s most severe macroeconomic recession in more than a century. During the steep recession, which stretched over more than two years, national production at one point fell 3.8 percent per annum while the unemployment rate rose from 4.6 to as high as 11.9 percent. This study, after delineating its methodology, examines the behavior of different Brazilian macroeconomic aggregates during the cycle.