Results for “age of em”

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University spokeswoman Cheryl Roland said a small goat crew has been on campus this summer, but not to cut grass.

“For the second summer in a row, we’ve brought in a goat crew to clear undergrowth in a woodlot, much of it poison ivy and other vegetation that is a problem for humans to remove,” Roland said. “Not wanting to use chemicals, either, we chose the goat solution to stay environmentally friendly.

“The area is rife with poison ivy and other invasive species, and our analysis showed the goats to be a sustainable and cost-effective way of removing them,” she added.

The goats were formally introduced to the campus and local community on June 2 in parking lot 51 of the Sindecuse Health Center.

Garrett Fickle and his wife, Gina, the owners of Munchers on Hooves in Coldwater, rent out their four-footed “lawn mowers” to homeowners, commercial property owners and other clients.

…The goats are ahead of schedule, said Nicholas Gooch, a university horticulturist and the project leader.

And yet:

The 400-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has filed a grievance contending that the work the goats are doing in a wooded lot is taking away jobs from laid-off union workers.

“AFSCME takes protecting the jobs of its members very seriously and we have an agreed-upon collective bargaining agreement with Western Michigan,” said Union President Dennis Moore. “We expect the contract to be followed, and in circumstances where we feel it’s needed, we file a grievance.”

Here is the full story, via Rayman Mohamed.

In addition to the Seattle study, another minimum wage paper crossed my path this week and it takes a very different approach than much of the literature. In Denmark the minimum wage jumps up by 40% when a worker turns 18. Thus the authors, Kreiner, Reck and Skov, ask what happens to the employment of young people when they hit their 18th birthday? Answer: employment drops dramatically, by one-third.

A picture tells the story. On the left is measured wages by age, the jump up due to the minimum wage law is evident at age 18. On the right is the employment rate–the jump down at age 18 is also evident as is a bit of pre-loss as workers approach their 18th birthday.

The authors have administrative data covering wages, employment and hours worked for the entire workforce of Denmark so their estimates are precise.

Denmark has laws making age discrimination illegal but these do not apply when a young person turns 18 and firms may legally search for under or over-18 age workers.

A variety of restrictions mean that under-18 age workers can do less than adults (e.g. they can’t legally lift more than 25 kilos or have a driver’s license.) Thus, productivity increases at age 18, making the employment loss at this age even more dramatic.

The authors can’t tell for certain if workers are quitting or getting fired but there are few other obvious discontinuities around exactly age 18. Students are eligible for certain benefits at age 18 but the authors are able to look at sub-samples where this objection doesn’t apply and the results are robust.

In a section of the paper that adds important new evidence to the debate, the authors look at the consequence of losing a job at age 18. One year after separation only 40% of the separated workers are employed but 75% of the non-separated workers are employed. Different interpretations of this are possible. The separated workers will tend to be of lower quality than the non-separated and maybe this is correlated with less desire to have a job. Without discounting that story entirely, however, the straightforward explanation seems to me to be the most likely. Namely, the minimum wage knocks low-skill workers off the job ladder and it’s difficult to get back on until their skills improve.

Hat tip: Ben Southwood.

I never imagined that Canadian finance ministers would one day worry about a shortage of marijuana. Welcome to 2017.

Bloomberg: The biggest challenge for Justin Trudeau’s forthcoming legal recreational marijuana market is a shortage of pot, the finance minister of Canada’s most-populous province says.

…Finance ministers were told demand is “quite high” for marijuana already in Canada, he said. “So we want to make certain that, when we do proceed, there is sufficient supply to accommodate the activity because what we’re trying to do is curb the illicit use and organized crime that now exists around it.”

The finance ministers’ worry, however, is misplaced. Canada’s system is not as open to entry as Colorado’s, so even with new licenses being approved rapidly, demand will increase faster than supply once legalization happens and prices will increase. That much is true. But much of the new demand will come from people who were deterred from buying illegally. As far as these buyers are concerned, the total price–including the price of possibly being caught–will have fallen, even as the money price rises. Many people who were buying illegally will also prefer to buy legally, even at the higher price. In other words, even if the price of legal pot is higher than the current illegal price, the demand for illegal pot will fall putting pressure on the criminal element.

As usual, the finance ministers forgot to think at the margin.

Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.

At Cato Unbound I argue for libertarian social engineering:

The better markets work, the less the demand for the state. By improving markets and other voluntary organizations, libertarians can make their political vision more attractive while at the same time making people better off.

Modern libertarianism began after many of the market institutions that we take for granted had already been developed. Fee simple property, for example, dates to 1290. Could we have a libertarian society without fee simple property? In theory, yes. In practice, the free society is attractive because it generates wealth. Without fee simple property it is, at the very least, more difficult to create a rich, industrialized society. The limited liability company dates much later than fee simple property, to the 19^th century.  Without the limited liability company, it would probably have been much more difficult to raise large amounts of capital. As a result, without limited liability, markets would be at a great disadvantage compared to the state in conducting economic activity on a large scale. Thus fee simple property and the limited liability company are among the technological/legal institutions that have made a free society possible, not because they are constitutive of a free society, but because they make a free society work better and compete better against statist alternatives.

So how can we improve markets? Public goods are one of the biggest challenges to markets and it was long thought that because of the free rider problem markets could not produce public goods. In Tabarrok (1998) I showed that such reasoning was wrong; a large class of public goods can be produced voluntarily using what today would be called a crowdfunding contract with a refund bonus or what I called at the time, the dominant assurance contract (DAC). My piece at Cato Unbound describes the DAC and also some other ideas for libertarian social engineering in more detail.

What’s important about dominant assurance contracts is not simply that they solve the public good problem but that:

Dominant assurance contracts open the provision of public goods to entrepreneurship, innovation, and the market discovery process.