Category: Uncategorized

1. The Political Economy of Tennessee Whiskey.
2. Ernest Hemingway’s Drinking Habits.

ht: Andrew Korsberg, Janet Hou.

Yes, they can, at least in places where development projects can undermine support for an insurrection. So say Crost et al. in an article (ungated earlier copy here) in the most recent issue of the American Economic Review:

We estimate the causal effect of a large development program on conflict in the Philippines through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary poverty threshold used to assign eligibility for the program. We find that barely eligible municipalities experienced a large increase in conflict casualties compared to barely ineligible ones. This increase is mostly due to insurgent-initiated incidents in the early stages of program preparation. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that insurgents try to sabotage the program because its success would weaken their support in the population.

I recently re-read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, and I was struck at just how many coordination failures he resolved in his lifetime in order to provide public goods. Off the top of my head, he founded a public library, he founded a university,  he created a public service in charge of extinguishing fires, organized street cleaning and garbage collection, etc. all in his native Philadelphia.

Reading about Franklin’s life and public service reminded me that he had been my initial inspiration for my “Contributing to Public Goods” series of posts. And since some of you might have missed most of those posts, I thought I would put them all in one place for now: