A very thorough review of my book Freedomnomics

An economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ronald Johnson, has written a very thorough review of my book Freedomnomics available here.  The price of the book is much, much lower than he indicates (!), but, besides that, it is a very nice review.

New Chinese edition of Freedomnomics

Of all the books that I have written, this is still my favorite one. If anyone knows how to find the order link for the Chinese version, I would appreciate finding out. The English version can still be found here.

The Chinese version is available here.

Thanks to Charles Stone for the link to the Chinese edition.

If this catches on there won't be many over the air radio stations

In some very real sense I view this as theft. The way people pay for "free" radio is to listen to the ads (see Freedomnomics for a history of this). As prices fall, presumably this device will become more common.

Myine Electronics' Abbee radio strips out ads and DJ chatter

By Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY
You adore listening to tunes on the radio. You just don't adore the lame commercials and blathering DJ chatter that accompanies the music. The $250 Abbee Commercial-Free Music System that I've been testing aims to solve this age-old predicament. The product, from Michigan start-up Myine Electronics, consists of two main components: a tabletop base stereo speaker system with a built-in FM tuner and a portable player called Music Lock, which plugs into the base. The twist: Abbee can automatically record songs from whichever FM station you're tuned to — but it manages to do so without the ads and idle chitchat. . . .

For the most part, Abbee works as promised. On only one song —The Young Rascals' Good Lovin' — did I hear a DJ who yammered well into the start of the selection. On a couple of other tracks, I heard a single word (e.g., "Supremes") from a DJ. The music sounded fine at the digital audio broadcast quality of 192 kilobits per second, though there were slight variations in volume on some tunes. I listened through the supplied earbuds and my car stereo (an auxiliary cable is included).

Still, there are drawbacks. On some songs, eliminating the DJ also means clipping the beginning or end of a track, just enough in a few instances to be bothersome. . . .

Hardcover Freedomnomics at new low paperback price

Freedomnomics is now 63 percent off and selling for only $10.26, cheap even for most paperbacks.

Freedomnomics Hardcover at Paperback prices

Amazon has reduced the price of Freedomnomics to just $10.99. I think that this is my best book.

Ann Coulter and Dennis Miller were nice enough to discuss the book on Friday here. A few reviews by those who have read the book would also be appreciated and if possible please "tag" it as being in economics.

Reviews at Facebook of Freedomnomics

Many are extremely nice, a few aren't, but I still appreciate people reading the book. The reviews are here.

New Kindle Version of Freedomnomics is available

For those who are interested, a Kindle version of Freedomnomics is now available. A Kindle version of the book works with Amazon.com's portable electronic book reader. I don't have one yet, but a few friends tell me it is a handy way for they to travel with multiple books at the same time. If you haven't read Freedomnomics yet, I think that it is my best book.

If you are willing, hitting the "Economics" tag under "Tags Customers Associate with This Product" is appreciated just so people who are searching for economics books will find it easier to see it.

Thanks.

Lower price on audio version of Freedomnomics

For those interested in the audio version of my book Freedomnomics, they can find it here. I think that the narrator, Brian Emerson, did a very good job on the book.

Walter Williams discusses Freedomnomics

Walter's entire piece can be seen here:

By taking a couple of courses in economic theory, we could immunize ourselves from nonsense spouted by politicians and pundits, but in the meantime check out Professor John R. Lott's "Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works."

His first chapter is "Are You Being Ripped Off?" It addresses myths about predation where it's sometimes alleged that corporations will charge below-cost prices to bankrupt their rivals and then charge unconscionable prices. There's little or no evidence that corporations would choose predation as strategy; there are too many pitfalls. A major one is that in order to recoup losses from charging low prices to bankrupt rivals, the predator would later have to charge higher-than-normal prices. That would attract new rivals who might have purchased the bankrupt assets of the predator's prey and be able to undercut the predator's prices. . . .

Thanks, Walter.

New Op-ed at Fox News: Why Political Flip-Flopping Matters

My newest op-ed at Fox News can be read in full here:

What restrains politicians and businesses from acting dishonestly? A lot of people would answer: nothing.

Periodic political and corporate scandals have created a popular image of politicians and businessmen as little more than a collection of cheats, liars and crooks. However, while there will always be some dishonest people in any profession, the vast majority of American politicians and businessmen do not end up being frog marched out of their offices in handcuffs with their heads held low in shame before a gaggle of news cameras.

What helps keep companies honest is the threat that if they cheat customers, people won’t buy from them again. But that won’t work for politicians. Politicians don’t always have the incentive of re-election because eventually they all face a last term in office. Politicians retire at some point. They can’t live forever.

So, if it isn't the threat of facing the voters, what could ensure that politicians keep their promises?

There has been a lot academic work studying this question, and the way to solve the problem is to elect politicians who inherently value the policy positions that they take. . . . .

Book signing today

Book signing this evening in Annapolis:

John Lott, an economist and author, will sign copies of his new book "Freedomnomics: Why The Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't" at a Tuesday book signing sponsored by the Maryland Republican Party.

Dr. Lott is an economics professor at the University of Maryland and has held posts at the University of Chicago and Yale University, and has served as chief economist of the United States Sentencing Commission that establishes sentencing policies and practices for the federal courts.

He has written five books, including one supporting gun rights.

The book signing will be held from 6-8 p.m. at the Maryland Republican Party Headquarters, 15 West St. in Annapolis. . . .

New Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: Campaign-Finance Breakdown

Bradley Smith and I have a piece on public financing of presidential campaigns:

Is 2008 the last hurrah for public-that is, taxpayer-financing of presidential campaigns? Since 1976, taxpayers have shelled out about $3 billion in current dollars to pay for presidential campaigns, including campaigns by John Hagelin, Lyndon LaRouche, Lenora Fulani, Ralph Nader, Sen. Alan Cranston, Milton Schaap, Ruben Askew, and other also rans. Funds have also paid for balloon drops at the party's conventions, negative TV ads, robocalls and more.

But this year, most leading presidential contenders refused to take the public subsidy-and accompanying spending limits-during the primaries. One exception has been Sen. John McCain. But faced with certain campaign realities, he too is now looking for a way out and is arguing that he has a constitutional right to withdraw from the public funding system for the primaries and, instead, rely on private money. Sen. Barack Obama said last year that he would accept taxpayer financing in the general election if the Republican nominee did too, but he has backed away from that promise.

All this is happening despite the fact that Republicans are nominating their champion of campaign finance reform, Mr. McCain, and a year ago Mr. Obama was lauded in the headlines and media coverage for his dedication to saving public financing of presidential campaigns. . . .

Is the "high price" of everything from coffee in restaurants to popcorn in movie theaters due to monopoly power?

A new paper by Richard Gil and Wesley Hartmann provides an explanation for the "high price" of popcorn in movie theaters:

Prices for goods such as blades for razors, ink for printers and concessions at movies are often set well above cost. This paper empirically analyzes concession sales data from a chain of Spanish theaters to demonstrate that high prices on concessions reflect a profitable price discrimination strategy often referred to as metering price discrimination. Concessions are found to be purchased in greater amounts by customers that place greater value on attending the theater. In other words, the intensity of demand for admission is metered by concession sales. This implies that while some consumers' surplus may be reduced by the high concession prices, surplus of other consumers on the margin of attending may increase from theaters' decisions to shift their margins away from movies and toward concessions.

First as a side note, most theaters, at least in the US, do not prevent people from bringing in concessions with them to the theater (I don't know about Spain), and that is at least inconsistent with the monopoly type story. It is also interesting to note that these claims about above marginal cost pricing are made for many similar product such as wine in restaurants or coffee or the differences between lunch and dinner prices, and it is hard to believe that monopoly power actually explains the "high prices" in all these cases. Russell Roberts and I provided a cost based explanation for all the phenomenon back in 1991 here. I guess that my biggest question is what else would one expect relating the log(concession revenue) with log(attendance) and Box Office revenue per attendee. Concession revenue goes up with attendance (though at a lower rate than attendance revenue -- congestion) and it goes up with box office revenue per attendee (presumably picking up the fact that higher revenue per attendee means fewer old people and very young people). What is the problem here and why is price discrimination the only answer here? By the way, when they run a regression that includes information on the number of screens and seats per screen (Table 2, specification 2), those two variables really explain all the variation in popcorn prices (something akin to the hypothesis that Russell and I advanced). I am also not clear why logs are used for concession revenue and attendance, but not box office revenue per attendee.

Another Review of Freedomnomics

Brian Shelly has a review of Freedomnomics here:

However, I read Freedomnomics by Economist Dr. John Lott. This book was a pretty easy read and I found some of the information jaw dropping. His specialty is crime and punishment and Chapter 4, which focuses on that, just blew me away. It really showed how conventional wisdom is flat out wrong when you look at the data on crime. . . .

Another Review of Freedomnomics

This review by Nathan was somewhat mixed:

I read it because I read Freakonomics, which, like other political (and semi-political) books, I found to be about "half-right," which is to say that a critical reading reduces it to the level of fiction; Freakonomics is opinion mixed in with statistics.

Freedomnomics proved to be exactly what I expected, which is to say, exactly the same but with different opinions. Where Freakonomics contests that Abortion decreased crime, Freedomnomics contests the opposite. Where Freakonomics says you shouldn't trust your Real Estate agent, Freedomnomics suggests otherwise.

I enjoy reading these kinds of books because I do read them through a critical lens, and I enjoy the facts that come out of them. Usually, a critical reading of these books allows the reader to examine the statistics and draw his own conclusions, often completely different than the opinions presented by the author(s).

For example, I learned from Freedomnomics that the "lemon effect" on new automobiles presented in Freakonomics is not true. This makes sense - the idea had long since made very little sense to me, as cars usually have warrantees that transfer with ownership transfers. Though Freedomnomics presented some opinions that seemed unfounded, the facts concerning automobiles (in the form of Kelly Blue Book prices) were also present, and these are indisputable . . .

Supreme Court Takes on Another Death Penalty Case

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court said on Friday it would decide whether the death penalty can be imposed for the crime of raping a child, expanding its review of how capital punishment is carried out in the United States.

The nation's highest court agreed to hear an appeal by a Louisiana man who is the only person in the United States on death row for a crime other than murder. He is arguing the death penalty for child rape violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. . . .

There is an interesting economics point here that I wrote about in Freedomnomics. I think that the evidence strongly shows a deterrence effect from the death penalty, but the argument could be quite different for other crimes. If you already face the death penalty for rape, you might want to kill the victim to avoid witnesses. After all, what more can they do to you if you already face the death penalty? The reason that isn't clear is because committing what is considered an even worse crime will increase the probability of arrest and also increase the probability of being given the death penalty. The fact that this child rapist is the only person on death row thus makes it more likely that the possibility of the death penalty for raping a child did not appreciably increase the likelihood that he would have killed his victim.

Another (very long) review of Freedomnomics

Economist WIlliam Sjostrom has a very nice review of my book up on his website. It was very nice of him to take this much time to review it.

The short version: my doubts are small. Read it, read it, read it, and, oh yeah, read it.

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.

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.

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.