I've been tapped by IU to do a 40 minute lecture to about 150-200 incoming SPEA students next week. The title of my presentation is Why We Need Economics to Make Policy: An Introduction on How Not To Kill People. You can find it here.
After some demo critical thinking problems, I provide pretty famous examples of policies with tragic unintended consequences. However, I could always use more, so if you have any other good examples I might want to consider, please do share!
Thanks in advance!
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
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4 comments:
Good presentation, found it through The Beacon blog. Dumb question -- what's going on with the terrorist alerts? Diverting resources from other issues?
Oh, and do you mind if I steal these examples for my own nefarious purposes?
I also followed a link in The Beacon.
I'd love to see your presentation developed into a video. Great title.
Feel free to use any part of it, I'm glad you like it. Contact me if you'd like sources/citations for the examples.
Regarding terrorists, I first read about this in Richard McKenzie's book "Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies" but the original research is in a working paper by Blaloc, Kadiyali, and Simon. The key point is security measures that deter people from traveling by air and thereby causing them to drive instead. We can think of Orange alerts as a policy of trading off between reducing the probability of a large attack with a larger probability of unseen car accidents. Longer lines at the airport for security checks is also part of the analysis.
This is a really helpful exercise for both marginal analysis (how safe do we want airplanes to be from terrorist attacks?) and political incentives (what incentive does homeland security actually have to consider the trade-off...they'll never be blamed for car accidents during Orange Alerts).
All the best.
I'm over from the Beacon, too. I like your slideshow and wish I had the full story (audio of your presentation) as it would probably fill in the blanks. Would you be willing to record your presentation of these slides? It's easy to use slideshare.net to coordinate the audio with the slides.
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