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In early 2012, I wrote a post titled “Speeding Fines that Vary with Income: Absolute vs. Relative Risk Aversion and Public Policy,” about income-proportional speeding tickets.

In light of the best evidence on the relationship between risk preferences and income–which essentially finds that as people get wealthier, they care less and less about gambling over a fixed dollar amount (say, $200), but their aversion to gambling a fixed fraction of their income or wealth (say, 1% of their income)–I explained that instead of fining people a fixed dollar amount for speeding, we should fine them a proportion of their income. In practice, this could be done by using a person’s declared income for the last year by checking with the IRS or with the department of revenue in the state where a person gets fined. In my post, I wrote:

“Milked and Feathered: The Regressive Welfare Effects of Canada’s Supply Management Regime.” That’s the title of a new article (gated, unfortunately) by the University of Manitoba’s Ryan Cardwell and coauthors in Canadian Public Policy/Analyse de politiques.

I recall first hearing about supply management policies in an international trade class I took as an undergraduate at the Université de Montréal. If you are not familiar with supply management, it consists broadly of three policy interventions:

That is the title of a short talk I gave to a bicameral (i.e., House and Senate), bipartisan audience of senior congressional staffers last Friday at the United States Capitol in Washington, DC. You can find the slides I had prepared for that talk here.

In my talk, I discussed progress (or lack thereof) on the Millennium Development Goals as well as the way forward, and I articulated my vision of what the development “industry” should be doing instead. A lot of what I discussed is related to things I have previously written about on this blog and in a Foreign Affairs article.