Lawrence MacDonald of the Center for Global Development interviews Paul about charter cities in the latest Global Prosperity Wonkcast (link preview). The discussion ranges from desalination, to formal sector employment opportunities, to the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands, to urban density, to storm surge, to the great state of Pennsylvania.
“…just because something is unfamiliar that doesn’t mean it’s inconceivable or it can’t happen…[T]hink more broadly [about] challenges that look intractable — poverty, the environment, green globalization, an urbanization wave of 3 billion people. If we open up our notion of what’s possible then these intractable problems look like real opportunities that could reshape the globe and change history.”
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Paul talks to Cafe Hayek blogger, and George Mason University professor Russ Roberts about charter cities on the latest EconTalk podcast. Topics include Haiti, social norms, congestion pricing in Stockholm, tradable fishing quotas, jaywalking in Zurich, Base Relocation and Closure, Jane Jacobs, Baron Haussmann, and casual Friday.
Edward Glaeser writes about the economic advantages of agglomeration for The New York Times Economix Blog. He notes that wages and productivity rise with population density. The correlation between productivity and density partly reflects the tendency for higher-skilled people to choose to live in denser areas. But Glaeser also believes that high-density cities are more productive because they allow people to connect and learn from one another.
For Glaeser, productivity is higher in cities not only because higher-skilled people choose to live in urban areas but also because higher density facilitates a more rapid exchange of ideas, allowing people to acquire productivity enhancing skills at a faster rate.
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Rules are ideas about how people interact with each other. They are the formal laws and social norms that govern daily life. The legitimacy of formal laws often depends on their compatibility with social norms. Social norms can complement formal laws and, in some cases, stand in when formal legal enforcement is absent or inefficient. In a guest post for the Freakonomics blog, Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman write about social norms among stand-up comedians.
Comics that steal jokes rarely face formal legal action. But comedians often enforce an informal rule against joke theft by sanctioning the offending comic. A joke thief can expect to be bad mouthed and ostracized by comedians who are willing to incur a cost to punish unacceptable behavior. Raustiala and Sprigman argue that informal enforcement allows comedians to “assert ownership of jokes, regulate their use and transfer, impose sanctions on joke-thieves, and maintain substantial incentives to invest in new material.”
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