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an excellent (wide-audience targeted) article on the upside of income inequality, by Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy. Greg Mankiw also writes about it (and singles out exactly the fragment I wanted to single out).
Category: Becker
Academic tenure: to be or not to be?
Excellent post of Steven Levitt on whether giving tenure in the academic environment (in Economics, in particular) makes any sense. Of course- and Levitt should know that, but maybe he doesn’t, since he does not say anything about it- both Richard Posner and Gary Becker extensively talked about this (and about tenure in general, though they did focus on the academic and judicial settings) on their common blog, more than a year ago (they also came back on the topic with answers to comments received on the initial posts, see Posner’s reply to comments and Becker’s reply to comments, respectively).
→ Read more Does China have a problem with the gender imbalance? If so, how big of problem?
Economics at work! Compare this article from the BBC (echoing what I believe to be the ‘general’- rather gloomy!- perspective on China’s gender imbalance) and the viewpoints of economists Gary Becker and Richard Posner, who start from discussing whether there is any valid case for forbidding the ‘sex selection’ practice, but end up discussing a series of wider implications.
→ Read more On Dutch coffeeshops and the war on drugs
Since I recently blogged about libertarianism, the Netherlands is in some respects (however, mind you: NL is far from being a pure ‘laissez faire’ country in general) a champion in succesfully implementing libertarian policies.
→ Read more Becker and Posner on ‘Libertarian Paternalism’
I have just read a wonderful critique of ‘libertarian paternalism’ by Gary Becker, complemented very nicely by Richard Posner. Some excerpts from both texts below (which also attempt a summary of the main arguments):
The term is indeed an oxymoron.
→ Read more