Peter Gallagher

A small selec­tion of excel­lent short “essays(link to doc on Caplan’s site, about 20k)”:http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/capency.doc on fun­da­men­tal top­ics (com­pe­ti­tion, prices, Bas­tiat etc) by Brian Caplan. Among other intrigu­ing work: his “article(link to doc on Caplan’s site, about 50k)”:http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/bsmb2.doc on using empir­i­cally sound, fal­si­fi­able pref­er­ence assess­ments (“Open­ness to Expe­ri­ence, Con­sci­en­tious­ness, Extra­ver­sion, Agree­able­ness, and Neu­roti­cism”) in eco­nomic expla­na­tions. …

Stu­art Harbin­son was appointed to be the WTO Direc­tor General’s Chief of Staff in June, before the Can­cún meet­ing. His state­ment makes it look like he is sim­ply fed-up with the lack of real engage­ment on agri­cul­tural reform. bq. “Chair­ing the agri­cul­ture nego­ti­a­tions has been extremely chal­leng­ing and reward­ing. In prac­tice it has been pos­si­ble …

Paddy McGuin­ness “nails(link to SMH story)”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/27/1067233101791.html the “con­spir­acy” behind pro­posed amend­ments to the Aus­tralian anti-dumping leg­is­la­tion to make it eas­ier for the same old pro­tec­tion­ist crowd to use ‘non-market econ­omy’ anti-dumping penal­ties against China. bq. In essence, the idea is to neu­tralise the moves towards freer trade in man­u­fac­tur­ing goods between China and Aus­tralia, block …

meta-creation_date: 3 Novem­ber, 2003 An “essay(link to Arnold Kling’s site)”:http://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst5/powell.html on reg­u­la­tion, com­pe­ti­tion and mar­ket infor­ma­tion by Arnold Kling that is a won­der­ful exam­ple of its kind. It’s brief, cur­rent and clar­i­fies some­thing that—although you may have lit­tle per­sonal inter­est in US telecomms regulation—crystalizes notions you’ve some­times enter­tained, but hadn’t artic­u­lated quite as well. An …

meta-creation_date: Novem­ber 3, 2003 Extend a line from Parkin­son through Oprah and Jerry Springer. Now, pro­duce it in an his­tor­i­cal direc­tion along the same plane as far as the 1760’s. With what fig­ure does it inter­sect, if not Boswell’s Jour­nal of a Tour to the Hebrides? bq. “I love anec­dotes. I fancy mankind may come, …

meta-creation_date: 3 Novem­ber, 2003 This abstract from “Yale Global”:http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=2704 poses the ques­tion: is research in soci­ol­ogy always this sloppy? Or are these guys just out of their depth? bq. It is high for­eign invest­ment con­cen­tra­tion, not for­eign invest­ment itself, that hin­ders eco­nomic growth in coun­tries like Hon­duras. There’s a wide-ranging, con­tin­u­ing debate on what the …