Try out these supply and demand tutorials.

Sorry but you'll have to copy them into the address bar. I am having a senior moment and can't figure out the html. (If you don't know what that means you have no standing to criticize.)

http://ecedweb.unomaha.edu/Dem_Sup/demand.htm

http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/prin/txt/SDch/ch3/testframe.html

This Just In! Death By Lethal Injection Is Dangerous!

What a great way to dodge the death penalty.

Dang it someone just threw a monkey wrench into my biofuel car!

Well just when I think ethanol looks great some wiseguy has to make a good argument against it. What do you think?

Apparently everything is for sale.

It's official. Now there is nothing you can't buy. This guy is selling his life. Not that he dies, you just get his lifestyle and identity. Check it out. What would your lifestyle be worth to someone?

Life 4 Sale

What 1.2 Trillion Can Buy?

Click on the image to see it better.

This Economix column addresses the relative cost of the war in Iraq. World War II cost about 30% of GDP, Korea 14%, Vietnam 9%, and Iraq? 1%. But what are some of the alternatives that could be done with that money? Remember, rational choices.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

This
link is to an op-ed piece by Robert Samuelson. He frequently writes economic columns for Newsweek. I don't agree with all his policy ideas but some I like alot. Especially the ones dealing with gas (but not the CAFE standards). The deeper we get into economics the more of his ideas you will understand. He is a brilliant mind - which means he'd never stand a chance in public office.

What do you think if his ideas?

Cash hurts more than plastic!

New reseach by an economist teamed with two neuroscientists has shown that paying by credit card people actually:

"balance the immediate pleasure of the prospective possession of a product with the immediate pain of paying for it...Emotion is as capable of assigning such a value as reason. Buying on credit, though, may be different. The abstract nature of credit cards, coupled with the deferment of payment that they promise, may modulate the “con” side of the calculation in favor of the “pro”."

So impulse buying is more likely with credit cards than with cash. Makes sense to me. And now there is scientific evidence.

Do you think you would, or do, spend more when you use plastic than when you use cash?

On a related note.

Here is a NY Times article about women who use cash to to hide some extravagant purchases from their husbands.

So how does this blog thing work?

When you comment on the blog use your first name and last initial along with the period you have economics. This will enable me to give you your participation grade. When you comment it will not show up until I have approved it. I am not looking at your comment to see if I agree with it, or even like it. I am only making sure it is appropriate content for young minds :)

You do not have to write a full blown treatise. Just share your thoughts. Have fun with it.

Consider this.

I am certainly not advocating that you should be looking for a mate (yet). But I thought this was an interesting article in the New York Times. It seems like good advice to me. I think you'll find that taking economics will change what you might look for in a potential spouse. It did for me (but it was too late, I already had landed my smokin' hot wife). Read the article and then tell me what you would you look for in a life long mate.



Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying

Relationship experts report that too many couples fail to ask each other critical questions before marrying. Here are a few key ones that couples should consider asking:
1) Have we discussed whether or not to have children, and if the answer is yes, who is going to be the primary care giver?
2) Do we have a clear idea of each other’s financial obligations and goals, and do our ideas about spending and saving mesh?
3) Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?
4) Have we fully disclosed our health histories, both physical and mental?
5) Is my partner affectionate to the degree that I expect?
6) Can we comfortably and openly discuss our needs, preferences and fears?
7) Will there be a television in the bedroom?
8) Do we truly listen to each other and fairly consider one another’s ideas and complaints?
9) Have we reached a clear understanding of each other’s spiritual beliefs and needs, and have we discussed when and how our children will be exposed to religious/moral education?
10) Do we like and respect each other’s friends?
11) Do we value and respect each other’s parents, and is either of us concerned about whether the parents will interfere with the relationship?
12) What does my family do that annoys you?
13) Are there some things that you and I are NOT prepared to give up in the marriage?
14) If one of us were to be offered a career opportunity in a location far from the other’s family, are we prepared to move?
15) Does each of us feel fully confident in the other’s commitment to the marriage and believe that the bond can survive whatever challenges we may face?

Even Criminals Use Marginal Thinking

By MORRIS B. HOFFMAN
Published: January 8, 2007
Denver

SIXTEEN years as a state trial judge have left me with a deep respect for the professionalism and competence of the public defenders who handle felony cases for indigent criminal defendants in my courtroom. In fact, I’ve told friends, only half-jokingly, that if they are ever charged with a serious criminal offense, the first thing they should do is give all their assets to charity, in an effort to qualify for public defender representation.

So when two economists from Emory University, Paul Rubin and Joanna Shepherd, agreed last year to collaborate with me on an econometric study of how effective public defenders really are, I had to guard against confirmation bias. I was positive that public defenders would prove more effective than their private counterparts. Mr. Rubin and Ms. Shepherd, with their occupational faith in markets, were equally positive of just the opposite. In the end, the economists were right, though with an interesting twist. (The full study has been published in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law.)

We looked at all 5,224 felony criminal cases filed in Denver in 2002. Most other studies measure lawyer effectiveness through indicators like acquittal rates, but we used the one thing criminal defendants care about most: the amount of jail or prison time they receive. Thus, acquittals counted as zero. Probationary sentences likewise counted as zero, unless the probation was combined with some jail time.

We counted halfway-house sentences as 120 days, which is typical for Denver defendants. We counted the initial length of a prison sentence without decreasing it for early release or increasing it for parole violations. Life sentences we arbitrarily counted as 110 years.

My economist friends were able to use regression analyses to control for other variables (such as whether a case was plea bargained or went to trial), to minimize the chance that the differences we found were caused by factors other than effectiveness. They also used regressions with different combinations of variables, to ensure that our results were not sensitive to a particular variable.

The results were surprising. The average sentence for clients of public defenders was almost three years longer than the average for clients of private lawyers.

But our most notable finding was hidden in one of the variables we had controlled — the seriousness of the case. We had assumed that public defenders on average handled more serious cases than private lawyers, if for no other reason than that such cases carry higher bonds, and defendants who can’t make those bonds are often rendered indigent by their pretrial incarceration. The length of their clients’ sentences would of course be distorted by the fact that they handle more serious cases with longer potential sentences.

But when we removed the control for the seriousness of the crime, public defenders performed relatively worse, not better (five years more incarceration versus three years more).

When we examined the seriousness of the cases handled by each type of lawyer, we discovered not only that private lawyers tend to handle more serious cases, but also that as the seriousness of the case increases, the chances that a private lawyer is handling it also increases. What in the world could explain such a result?

It turns out that the explanation, at least in part, is one that should put a smile on the face of all free-marketers and rational choice theorists: criminal defendants, just like any other consumers of services, appear to be making choices based on their rational assessments of costs and benefits. But, you might ask, do criminal defendants ever really have a choice between public defenders and private counsel? It appears many do.

Our data suggested that, contrary to the law’s rather binary notion of indigency, a large chunk of felony criminal defendants are what we have called “marginally indigent.” They could, if they had to, tap hidden resources, or the resources of family and friends, to retain private lawyers. But what drives that decision? Just what you’d expect from any rational consumer of criminal defense services: a combination of the seriousness of the offense and the likelihood of conviction.

Imagine a guilty, marginally indigent defendant facing a relatively minor felony (for which he will most likely get probation). Now add to the mix the fact that his crime was captured on videotape, meaning he has a small chance of avoiding conviction. It is unlikely such a defendant would deplete his and his family’s and friends’ resources to hire a private lawyer when he could get a free public defender to achieve the same result.

At the other end of the spectrum, imagine a marginally indigent defendant charged with first degree murder, and imagine that he is innocent. Wouldn’t that defendant do everything in his power to marshal the resources to hire a private lawyer, if he believed, rightly or wrongly, that the private lawyer were more likely to achieve an acquittal?

In other words, marginally indigent defendants who choose public defenders tend to be guilty. And of course if that’s true, it’s not at all surprising that public defenders would achieve less favorable outcomes.

More work needs to be done to confirm these results. But if they hold, and hold nationally, they could have important policy implications. Roughly one-third of all states have formal statewide public defender systems, and several others have regional or local systems. Current debates about improving these systems tend to revolve around two poles: increased financing (for which public defenders have been clamoring since the 1980s, when per client spending in most systems, in real dollars, took a nose dive from which it has never recovered) and, more recently, privatization.

If it is true that public defenders achieve substantially worse results for their clients than private lawyers, that fact should be troubling to us all, quite apart from whether the difference is the product of underfinancing, government inefficiencies or both.

But our results suggest a more benign explanation, and a less drastic solution than spending more on public defenders or privatizing the system. If self-selection by guilty, marginally indigent defendants is driving a big part of this effectiveness difference, the remedy may simply be to tighten the mechanisms we use to determine indigency. This solution would not only reduce the outcome differences between public defenders and private defense lawyers, but it would also give taxpayers more bang for their public defender buck.


Morris B. Hoffman is a Colorado state trial judge and a fellow at the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research.

So what do you think? Would you use a public defender? As a juror would you think someone who was using a public defender was more likely to be guilty? Let's hear what you think.