Wednesday, September 30, 2015

David Kendall visits Susquehanna

David Kendall visited Susquehanna today!  He presented "Morality and Capitalism" at 7:30 PM, but was busy all day.  He had a chance to meet with students during a class and at a meet-and-greet session.  He was also "On the Mark" (on the local radio show).


Here are some pictures of Dr. Kendall meeting with students and with me at the speech.






Sunday, September 20, 2015

Making your own sandwich and gains from trade

Vox has a great video about a person who creates his own sandwich.  It takes 6 months and costs $1,500.

We sometimes forget how much better off our lives are because of trade.  This video does a great job reminding us there are incredibly large gains from trade!

Saturday, September 12, 2015

My new article on using monetary incentives when teaching

Recently published in the Journal of Economic Education.

Abstract:
Using 641 principles of economics students across four universities, the authors examine whether providing monetary incentives in a prisoner's dilemma game enhances student learning as measured by a set of common exam questions. Subjects either play a two-player prisoner's dilemma game for real money, play the same game with no money at stake (i.e., play a hypothetical version), or are in a control group where no game is played. The authors find strong evidence that students who played the classroom game for real money earned higher test scores than students who played the hypothetical game or where no game was played. Their findings challenge the conventional wisdom that monetary incentives are unnecessary in classroom experiments.

Great point by David Henderson

Link here

Henderson writes:
I hit a point where it would have made sense to hire an employee part-time if I could have paid her hourly and kept zero or minimal records. But I knew enough about the law to know that that could get me in trouble.

I think that lawmakers who want to "do something" about problems don't imagine their "solutions" will cause harm.  Unfortunately, they do.