The high cost of regulation: compact fluorescent lights

CFLs contain mercury. If one breaks in your home, Kazman says, EPA guidelines suggest you open windows and leave the room for at least a quarter of an hour before trying to clean up the mess. And for God's sakes don't use a vacuum, which could disperse the poison into the air. Even when they're intact, U.S. News happily tells us, "the bulbs must be handled with caution. Using a drop cloth might be a good new routine to develop when screwing in a light bulb."

I really wonder whether people have thought of these bulbs being used in real world use. How will be dispose of them? Will people actually keep them on for 15 minutes after they have been turned on? Suppose that you just want to temporarily turn on the light when you go into a room. What about the time costs of people having to come back a second time to turn it off? What about the costs of people's time waiting for these lights to warm up? What about the fact that people might have to turn on more lights because these new bulbs don't produce as much light? This has to be one of the dumber regulations in a long time.

Czechs upset at having to pay less than $2 for a doctor's visit

The Czech healthcare system undergoes a minor revolution on 1 January as patients are asked to pay a small fee each time they visit their doctor.

The move is part of a widespread reform of the health sector unveiled by the centre-right government.

It is far from popular - a number of leading figures are calling on Czechs not to pay up.

Czechs enjoyed free healthcare during four decades of communist rule and in the past 17 years of capitalism.

But from 1 January, Czech patients will be asked to pay 30 crowns (£0.83; 1.1 euros) for each visit to the doctor, and 60 crowns for each day spent in hospital. . . . .

If $1.50 dissuades someone from going to the doctor, you have to wonder how badly they had to go to the doctor. It is pretty obvious that they shouldn't be wasting the doctor's time if they don't value the service at $1.50 or so. Clearly, this $1.50 is much too low.

Somebody please provide an economic justification for these different government spending items

Some of the spending in the new Federal budget that congress enacted. Where is the federal issue in these spending proposals? I don't see the externality issue for the Lobster Institute. Where is the national concern with managing beavers in North Carolina or rats in Arkansas? As far as bees go, why isn't it a simply question of supply and demand (see Freedomnomics for a discussion about how the market solves free-riding problems in this problem)?

Next time you go out for seafood, remember the $188,000 lawmakers sent to the Lobster Institute in Orono, Maine. Then there was the tidy sum to the pest-control industry in the form of $2.5 million to fight grasshoppers and Mormon crickets in Nevada and Utah; $223,000 to manage beavers in Raleigh, N.C.; $3.7 million to combat termites in New Orleans; $244,000 to conduct bee research in Weslaco, Texas.

Congress, which spends millions battling roaches and rodents in the Capitol, has a thing about bugs. It can't spend enough on them: $353,000 to battle the Asian long-horned beetle in Illinois; $234,000 to help an American laboratory in Montpellier, France fight the olive fruit fly; $113,000 to go after rodents in Arkansas.

This is just a sampling of the 11,331 "earmarks" (a 426 percent increase over last year) that this Congress snuck into its annual appropriations bills and accompanying reports for fiscal year 2008 -- nearly 10,000 of them in the omnibus bill alone. Want more?

-- $700,000 for a bike trail in Minnesota.

-- $200,000 for a post office museum in downtown Las Vegas.

-- $1 million for a river walk in Massachusetts.

-- $150,000 for the Louis Armstrong Museum in Queens, N.Y.

-- $200,000 for the Hunting and Fishing Museum in Pennsylvania.

-- $113,000 for rodent control in Alaska.

-- $4 million for a Beverly Hills veterans' park.

-- $37,000 for the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.

-- $8.8 million for the Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium at Eastern Kentucky University.

-- $2.4 million for renovations in the Haddad Riverfront Park in Charleston, W.Va.

-- $250,000 for construction work at the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Center in Prosser, Wash.

More Reviews of Freedomnomics

"These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty" writes:

More than just a response to “Freakonomics”, this is a great book that explains why the free market works and socialism doesn’t.

New Op-ed: The High Cost of Higher MPG restrictions

Here is a new piece that I have in Human Events:

Who can oppose making cars "more efficient"? Could you imagine what would happen to legislation requiring cars to be less "efficient"? Certainly there weren't many such politicians in Washington, DC. President George Bush signed the Energy Bill on Wednesday and overwhelming numbers of Congressmen and Senators voted for it.

But what counts as "efficient" isn't always obvious. . . . .

Lower the cost, people do more of it

The cost of doing something can take many forms. One cost of doing things involves the cost of figuring out how to do it and physically executing that decision. For those that haven't used it, the iPhone does a remarkable job of making tasks such as surfing the web or sending emails remarkably simple. Perhaps then these facts in the Financial Times aren't too surprising:

About 60 per cent of iPhone customers are sending or receiving more than 25 megabytes of data per month, which is the equivalent of sending 7,500 e-mails.

By comparison, only 1.8 per cent of O 2 's other mobile customers on monthly contracts are consuming more than 25MB per month.

The O 2 research suggests that, after years of dashed hopes for the operators, customers are on the verge of surfing the web on their mobiles in significant numbers. This could in the future make mobile advertising a significant revenue stream for the operators. . . . .

The changing sex ratio in South Korea

In South Korea, once one of Asia’s most rigidly patriarchal societies, a centuries-old preference for baby boys is fast receding. And that has led to what seems to be a decrease in the number of abortions performed after ultrasounds that reveal the sex of a fetus.

According to a study released by the World Bank in October, South Korea is the first of several Asian countries with large sex imbalances at birth to reverse the trend, moving toward greater parity between the sexes. Last year, the ratio was 107.4 boys born for every 100 girls, still above what is considered normal, but down from a peak of 116.5 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990. The most important factor in changing attitudes toward girls was the radical shift in the country’s economy that opened the doors to women in the work force as never before and dismantled long-held traditions, which so devalued daughters that mothers would often apologize for giving birth to a girl.

The NY Times attributes this sea change to things like an advertising campaign by the government. An explanation that I had given in Freedomnomics was that as the ratio of men to women rose, women would become more valuable. In competition to marry women, men would be forced to offer them more and it would open opportunities for women. Nothing more than simple supply and demand is needed to explain the societal changes.

Another Review of Freedomnomics

I first heard of Dr. John R. Lott's Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't on Neal Boortz's radio program. Mr. Boortz made repeated reference to one particular chapter in the book dealing with the effects women's suffrage has had on the growth of government in the United States, and I found my interest piqued, especially as our household already has Dr. Lott's More Guns, Less Crime on our shelves, and I know him to be a meticulous researcher. . . .

As I said, Dr. Lott covers far more than this. Overall, the book is to-the-point, logically organized, quite accessible to the layman, and highly entertaining. Highly recommended.

Appearance from Thursday on The Greg Knapp Experience

"Lou Pate filling in for Greg talks to John Lott about why what Congress did yesterday would NOT have stopped the VA Tech shooting." For a copy of the interview go here.

Another mention of Freedomnomics

Training Within Industry was nice enough to write this:

A great book about incentives, progress and human behavior is Freedomnomics, a well written rebuttal of the book Freakonomics. To get “the other side of the story”, check it out.

More comments on Freedomnomics

I'm just getting started on this book. So far, it is--thankfully!--a much more interesting read than Dr. Lott's More Guns, Less Crime, which is a marvelous repository of information and should be on the shelf of everyone interested in the second amendment, self-defense, crime, and liberty, but is nevertheless, for the most part, a drearily boring exposition of reams of statistical data that only the most determined reader will slog through to confirm a thesis which is intuitively obvious to most of us: a ubiquitously armed citizenry suffers less crime.

Well, I didn't mean to slam More Guns, Less Crime. Like I said, it should be on shelves everywhere. I'm just sayin' Freedomnomics looks to be a considerably more entertaining read, though no less informative.

Podcast from Appearance on Air America last Thursday

Thom Hartmann had me on his show again last week. This was not the liveliest show that I was on last week to discuss my piece on women's suffrage. You can listen to the podcast here.