Is social security an externality?

Location: In Pulsinelli's Class

Sources used by Pulsinelli today:

Coase - "The Lighthouse in Economics," from the Journal of Law and Economics; October 1974 pp 357-76

Cheung - "The Fable of the Bees: an Economic Investigation," from the Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 16; 1973 pp 11-33

B.L. Bensen - "Are Public Goods 'Really Common Pools?'," from Economic Inquiry, vol. 32; April 1994

D.B. Klein - "The Voluntary Provision of Public Goods? The Turnpike Companies of Early America," from Economic Inquiry, vol. 28; 1990 pp 788-812

D.B. Klein and C. Yin, "Use, Esteem, and Profit in Voluntary Provision: Toll Roads in California, 1850-1902," from Economic Inquiry, Vol. 34, 1996

S.R. Rhinehart + Pompe, "Entrepreneurship and Coastal Resource Management," from The Independent Review, vol. 1, Spring 1997, pp 543-590

B. Vandle, "Environmental Turning Points, Institutions, and the Race to the Top," from The Independent Review, Vol. 9 (Fall), pp 211-260

T. C. Anderson and P.S. Hill, "The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier," from Stanford University Press, 2004



3. Communal ownership of property is okay if there are zero transactions costs
Coase's contribution to economics has to do with transaction costs like: discovering with whom they must deal,
Value to factory owner being 18,000 per year
value to residents is 10,000/year
transactions costs = 9,000/year

If the court rules the factory isn't liable, the factory owner will pollute.
if the court rules the factory is liable, the factory owner won't pollute (transaction costs already too high), and they don't have the ability to pay any further worth.

if transactions costs are efficient or low, an efficient choice independent of property rights is found. Under that arrangement, an efficient resource use results from bargaining regardless of legal assignment of property rights.

If transaction costs are not low, an efficient choice is harder to come by, unless the legal right is given to the more efficient being in the first place. Or....
if transaction costs are high, then an inefficient solution is possible if property rights are assigned incorrectly

Assignment of property rights lead to "wealth effects" - which could lead to a different output quantity (and therefore a different amount of pollution) than what is optimal.

New Direction

I don't have the ability to sustain my fiction writing - I just get caught up and distracted by too much. From this point out, I think I'm going to see about renaming the blog and making it a sort of "blog o everything." Subjects I'm interested in (and presented in no particular order) are:

Short stories (because they end)
Gaming
Cooking
Christianity
Forensics/Debate
Beer
Marriage
News events