Category: Economics

Iain Murray reports on the new London five pound fee (about eight dollars, and enforced by a penalty), charged to each car entering central London. It turns out the fee has been set too high, and traffic has fallen by more than the projected fifteen percent. Nor does the fee appear to be maximizing revenue. Mayor Livingstone wants to continue the high fee, however, because he likes the environmental effects of much lower traffic, despite a serious hit to London retail sales.

By the way, over 100,000 people are refusing to pay their penalty notices.

Addendum: Transportblog.com, an excellent source, offers some follow-up and commentary.

Go to www.nationmaster.com, an excellent source of data across the nations, on many different topics. The pointer is from www.crookedtimber.org, which also pulls out a list of countries where you are most likely to die before reaching forty years of age. The first thirty-four are all in Africa, then comes Haiti, then Madagascar.

If you look at what different central bankers earn, Alan Greenspan is way down on the list with his $172,000 a year. Is the Finnish central banker really worth more money?

The deeper question is whether we need to pay American central bankers more. How many of you have heard of Matti Vanhala? Well, he is the Finnish central banker. Greenspan earns a greater fame (and power) return. The head of the Hong Kong central bank makes over a million dollars a year. High public sector salaries are useful for limiting corruption, but this is not an obvious danger in the case of the American Fed. The head of the New York Fed makes $315,000, almost twice what Greenspan does, but how many of you could produce the name of Bill McDonough at the drop of a hat?

What does it mean to have property rights and prices in the virtual world of computer games? Did you know that you can buy a “virtual sword” on ebay? Did you know that the male avatars sell for more than the female avatars, despite having the same capabilities? What are virtual economies all about? Read this article, fascinating but sometimes incoherent as well, for a take on these new developments.

…is spent on the last year of human life. Read this interesting paper by Charles Jones of Berkeley, who tries to explain why health care expenditures now account for 14 percent of gdp.

“Cities, Regions and the Decline of Transport Costs”, a 2003 working paper by Edward Glaeser and Janet Kohlhase, provides stimulating reading. They build a model, overturning standard location theory, under the assumption that transportation costs are zero.

Does that sound crazy? They estimate that for machinery, electrical equipment, and transportation equipment, transportation costs are no more than 1.2 percent of the value of the product. 36 percent of all shipments, measured by value, fall into this cost category. Transportation costs for goods have been falling for a long time, and will continue to fall.

It is moving human beings that is expensive, not moving goods. Traffic congestion is an increasing problem. It is now less important to live near natural resources, and more important to live in good weather and under good government. Plus people want to live near other people, leading to greater population concentration in SMSAs. But within metropolitan areas, people are dispersing themselves more, they want to be close but not too close. Don’t buy real estate in Duluth (once a vitally important port) is, I think, the final lesson.

I used to (i.e., last week) believe the following two claims:

1) Taking the government policies of country A as constant, more trading opportunities with country B will make country A better off.

2) International competition will force countries to improve their economic policies, otherwise they will be “left behind.”

I know many classical liberals who believe both propositions, as did I. But it is not so easy to square the circle. If 2) is true, that must mean that if country A faces greater international competition, and does not improve its economic policies, it must be worse off (admittedly the phrase “left behind” is vague, but what else could it mean?). Which means that 1) cannot be true as stated.

You might argue for a different version of 2): “2a) International competition will force countries to improve their economic policies, competition benefits the citizens no matter what, but it will starve the government of revenue, presumably because of resource mobility.”

But 2a), while possible, is a funny claim. If the citizens are better off, you might think that gdp is higher, and thus you might think that tax revenue is higher as well. Rising standards of living tend to produce rising tax revenue. You could spin a scenario where capital flight, combined with goods reimportation, raises living standards while lowering tax revenue, but it will be hard to find this empirically.

Alternatively, you might argue for a better version of 1): “1a) More trading opportunities are good for country A, in part because they force country A to improve its economic policies.” This will work, but it is a weaker argument for free trade for country A than we are used to.

So what gives? I suggest two adjustments. First, free trade can sometimes make country A worse off, even if it benefits countries A and B in the aggregate. Second, international competition may motivate countries to make reforms by threatening a loss of relative international status, but it won’t make the citizens in country A worse off in most plausible cases. My views are thus revised.