MP3 of Interview with Kirby Wilbur on Seattle's KVI

Kirby WIlbur was nice enough to have me on his radio show on Friday. A MP3 of an interview can be found here. Go to a little past the half way point in the mp3.

Video of Puget Sound Federalist Society Talk on Freedomnomics

A video of my recent talk at the Puget Sound Federalist Society that was done by TV Washington can be seen here. This should give people a good idea of the book. It airs live TV Washington on Tuesday, October 30th @ 10:15pm (with repeats on Wednesday, Oct. 31st @ 6:15am and 2:15pm).

Talks this coming week

This will be a busy week:

Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Va. at noon on Tuesday October 23rd (For past discussions that I have had on the tragic attack in 2002 at the law school see here) -- Gun Control
Puget Sound Federalist Society (Seattle, Washington) at 6:30 PM on Wednesday, October 24th -- Freedomnomics
University of Washington Economics Department at 2 PM on Thursday, October 25th -- Measuring Media Bias (Something discussed in Freedomnomics)
Women of Washington at 7 PM in Seattle on Thursday, October 25th -- Freedomnomics
Free Enterprise Conference 2007 at the Westin in Bellevue on Friday night at 9:16 PM-- Freedomnomics

Radio Interview with Jason Lewis on KTLK

An MP3 of the radio interview on Freedomnomics and other issues is available here.

Mass email that I received opposing free-trade

Another American company is deserting the United States, seeking cheap labor, less government regulations and lower taxes. Hershey, whose name has been synonymous with U.S. candymaking for more than a century, is moving a bigger chunk of its production to Mexico. The company has announced as a part of its restructuring that it will scale back its workforce of 1,500 jobs and force some U.S. plants ot close. Management predicts it will save $190 million per year and who can blame the company? The real blame it a the door step of the free trade advocates in your Administration who make it extremely difficult to operate with any success in our country.

E. F. Jones

The last five or so administrations have been pushing what are generally free trade rules. Besides that shouldn't we require each state or better even each town to be self sufficient? I am personally very upset that Virginians could have had jobs producing cars that workers in Ohio and Michigan end up getting. Let's at least be consistent and insist that every local community be self sufficient. While it is true that the costs of products would rise much more than any possible benefit from keeping the jobs, at least we would have the jobs, right? After all, there are a finite number of jobs.

More benefits from Ann Coulter mentioning my book

Neal Boortz was nice enough to plug my book. I owe Ann a lot on this book.

Friday, October 5, 2007
COULTER CATCHING FLACK

You just knew the left was going to go into Ann Coulter's new book "If Democrats had Brains They'd be Republicans." It look like the left is going to focus on Coulter's statement that if women didn't have the right to vote we would never elect another Democrat president. If you would like to look at the science here, instead of just going along with the leftist crowd, get a copy of Dr. John Lott's book "Freedomnomics." There's a chapter there on voting ... it will open your eyes. Here's your link if you want to order the book. I enjoyed it immensely.

Market Failure: Supposedly not enough diversity

This brings us back to Nike's new shoe. Foot Locker is full of options that fit me and most other Americans. But American Indians make up just 1.5 percent of the U.S. population, and with feet on average three sizes wider, they need different-sized shoes. If we had all voted in a national election on whether the Ministry of Shoes should make wide or typical-width shoes, we surely would have chosen the latter. That's why Friedman condemned government allocation. And yet the market made the same choice. If Nike's announcement looks like a solution to this problem of ignored minority preference, it really isn't. The company took too many years to bring the shoe on line, and according to the Associated Press, the new sneaker "represents less of a financial opportunity than a goodwill and branding effort." . . . .

1) "That's why Friedman condemned government allocation. And yet the market made the same choice." If the size of the particular group is so small or if those in the group aren't willing to pay that much for the shoes, you might not get a product specifically designed for each small group, but it is a long way to implying that the market doesn't produce a lot more diversity of products than the government.

2) "The company took too many years to bring the shoe on line . . . ." There is a cost and benefit from producing this diversity of products. I would guess that the benefits now exceed the costs. Possibly the cost of making products for such small niches has gone down. The article mentions that these wider feet might be do to "diabetes and related conditions" and possibly more people generally are suffering from this problem. (It isn't clear from the piece what percentage of the 1.5 percent of the population who are Indians have these wide feet, but presumably it is less than 1.5 percent.) Bottom line: what evidence is provided here that it took "too many years" to provide these shoes. That is, "too many years" in the sense that the costs of doing this were less than the benefits (total costs including the costs of figuring out that such a market existed) and yet it was not provided.

3) Just because Nike wasn't producing these shoes, I would have liked some evidence that shoes weren't already being produced for this segment of the market. I looked up some shoes on the internet and it seemed that this market niche was well covered see here, here, and here. You get sizes from EEEEEE to XW, and I haven't even heard of some of these sizes since they are so wide. I see no evidence that the basic claim in this article is correct.