This policy is creating perverse incentives and undermining national prosperity.

Taxes undermine incentives to be productive.

A new book exposes the faults in the Nordic welfare state model.

By the standards of any normal and rational person, the US system is producing better outcomes.

Best that can be said about the Nordic welfare state is that the damage is somewhat contained by cultural norms.

Throwing cold water on Scandimania.

There’s an old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. That may be true if you’re in Hollywood and visibility is a key to long-run earnings. But in the world of public policy, you don’t want to be a punching bag. And that describes my role in a book excerpt just published by Salon. Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematics professor […]

Are there any fact checkers at the New York Times? Since they’ve allowed some glaring mistakes by Paul Krugman (see here and here), I guess the answer is no. But some mistakes are worse than others. Consider a recent column by David Stuckler of Oxford and Sanjay Basu of Stanford. Entitled “How Austerity Kills,” it […]

I wrote last year about the way in which welfare programs lead to very high implicit marginal tax rates on low-income people. More specifically, they lose handouts when they earn income. As such, it is not very advantageous for them to climb the economic ladder because hard work is comparatively unrewarding. Thanks to the American […]