For your edification - blog site

[Randy_Refeld]

Both of these gentlemen were required reading in my undergrad econ program. I am sure Gary Becker is the more respected fo the two.

RR

[zaxx19]

Was Becker the guy who was against live aid for east africa.....the funny thing is most of the things he predicted for East Africa have actually come true..

[Cyrus]

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Becker has written papers on what is the optimal amount of support a parent should give to a child, not for the child's sake but so the parent will be taken care of later in life.

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The decisions taken by people regarding their own retirement plans and their offspring's inheritance make for very interesting studying. If you are interested I can give some examples.

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He also wrote a paper ... about how AIDS drugs will promote the spread of the disease.

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This would seem counter-intuitive. Aspirin causing more headaches? Condom use increasing unwanted childbirths??

Perhaps he is referring to the studies about mandatory seat belts causing more relaxation by drivers and, hence, more car accidents.

Any links please?

[Boris]

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This would seem counter-intuitive. Aspirin causing more headaches? Condom use increasing unwanted childbirths??

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Aspirin and condoms have a high probability of preventing headaches and pregnancy respectively. The current availability of AIDS cocktails do nothing to prevent the disease. They merely reduce the costs associated with contracting AIDS. Prior to advances in AIDS therapy drugs there was a steady decline in infection rates in developed countries, attributed largely to education efforts. Becker made a prediciton in a WSJ editorial that promising AIDS treatments would reverse this trend. He prediction turned out to be true at least among young gay males in the US. I'm too tired to search for any links. I'm not even sure that Becker published a peer reviewed paper on the subject. Just to be clear, I don't think Becker is anti-AIDS treatments. He was merely making a prediction that benefits of these drugs may not be as great as predicted.

The AIDS case is more similiar to the seatbelt use case. In both there are noticeable effects of what the economists refer to as off setting behavior. Seatbelts definitely save lives, just not as many as one would expect.

[Boris]

I do not smoke the marijuana; I only snort the cocayeene.

[natedogg]

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One of the two men running the blog is the author of some very good books.

Highly recommended among them is the one about the JFK assassination, of course. See if you can ever take Oliver Stone seriously again after reading it.

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There are people who take Oliver Stone seriously? Seriously? [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]


natedogg