> average people of the damage done by a wide range of economic policies, including bans on direct sales of autos by manufacturers, rent controls, occupational licensing laws, the Jones Act, prohibition of kidney sales, sugar import quotas, nationalized air traffic control, residential zoning and a zillion other examples I could cite.
Halfway through this I started anticipating indentured servitude and Food and Drug Act.
Some things that aren't Pareto Optimal/wringing every penny out of a market are good because they enable a lot of other efficiencies. I think clean air and water standards, and reliable food are some of these. Banking laws might be another.
Nigeria is poor because they believe in the concept of comparative advantage. Anyone who doesn't believe in the concept of comparative advantage knows that every country needs to invest in a large variety of industries even if they aren't world leaders and not be overly dependent on a single industry.
There is also the problem that a lot of comparative advantages were "created" and not the result of some endowment of resources or geography. You can tell a comparative advantage story after the fact, but you can't derive much policy from it since it is by definition status quo bias.
The status quo is optimal, therefore any deviation would result in suboptimality. That is how economists think.
> average people of the damage done by a wide range of economic policies, including bans on direct sales of autos by manufacturers, rent controls, occupational licensing laws, the Jones Act, prohibition of kidney sales, sugar import quotas, nationalized air traffic control, residential zoning and a zillion other examples I could cite.
Halfway through this I started anticipating indentured servitude and Food and Drug Act.
Some things that aren't Pareto Optimal/wringing every penny out of a market are good because they enable a lot of other efficiencies. I think clean air and water standards, and reliable food are some of these. Banking laws might be another.
Nigeria is poor because they believe in the concept of comparative advantage. Anyone who doesn't believe in the concept of comparative advantage knows that every country needs to invest in a large variety of industries even if they aren't world leaders and not be overly dependent on a single industry.
There is also the problem that a lot of comparative advantages were "created" and not the result of some endowment of resources or geography. You can tell a comparative advantage story after the fact, but you can't derive much policy from it since it is by definition status quo bias.
The status quo is optimal, therefore any deviation would result in suboptimality. That is how economists think.