Role of Government

Studying the Biases of Bureaucrats

“There is a fashionable new science—behavioral economics, they call it—which applies the insights of psychology to how people make economic decisions. It tries to explain, for instance, the herd instinct that led people during the recent bubble to override common sense and believe things about asset values because others did: the ‘bandwagon effect.'”

Did 2010’s Man of the Year Die in 1897?

“If you’re a renter who reads the newspapers, you have spent the last few years in a constant state of low-level anger at this “bizarre spectacle”—the unexamined assumption that perpetually escalating housing prices are the natural state of human affairs, and certainly a good enough proxy for economic health that the two quantities are freely interchangeable. How much more bizarre must it look in England?”

Featured News

The Renewable Part of Hydrogen is the Hype

Once again, the world is staging ClimateFest 26, aka the United Nations Conference of the Parties, where peddlers of alternative energy schemes try to plunge their dippers into the river of climate change funding that flows around the world. This funding is generated...

Klein Crowd on a Spending Spree

In 1996-97 –the low point of the Klein-era cuts — the provincial government spent $12.7 billion on program expenses (all government activities, except debt servicing). In 2005-06, the CTF reminded, “spending on overnment programs in Alberta will be $25.5 billion — an increase of 100 per cent.”