Infrastructure, Privatization, and Autonomous Vehicles with Clifford Winston

Today’s guest is Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution. We discuss infrastructure, particularly roads and airports, and the incentives faced by their users. Bad incentives create congestion problems that can’t be solved by simply throwing more money into infrastructure; you need to fix the incentives! Clifford’s work on privatization shows how it could improve incentives and reduce the costs of congestion.

Clifford argues that self-driving cars will fix some of the problems created by bad policy. We also discuss the letter grades issued for infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers and what they do and don’t tell us about the quality of American infrastructure.


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The post Infrastructure, Privatization, and Autonomous Vehicles with Clifford Winston appeared first on The Economics Detective.

Infrastructure, Privatization, and Autonomous Vehicles with Clifford Winston

Today’s guest is Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution. We discuss infrastructure, particularly roads and airports, and the incentives faced by their users. Bad incentives create congestion problems that can’t be solved by simply throwing more money into infrastructure; you need to fix the incentives! Clifford’s work on privatization shows how it could improve incentives and reduce the costs of congestion.

Clifford argues that self-driving cars will fix some of the problems created by bad policy. We also discuss the letter grades issued for infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers and what they do and don’t tell us about the quality of American infrastructure.


Download this episode.

Subscribe to Economics Detective Radio on iTunes, Android, or Stitcher.

The post Infrastructure, Privatization, and Autonomous Vehicles with Clifford Winston appeared first on The Economics Detective.

The Economics of the Weird with Peter Leeson

Peter Leeson of George Mason University joins the podcast today to discuss his latest book, WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird.

We discuss the economic reasoning behind some of history’s strangest practices: ordeals that were used to determine innocence or guilt in medieval Europe, trials by battle that were used to settle land disputes in Norman England, wife auctions that happened during the Industrial Revolution, and the criminal prosecution of insects and rodents by ecclesiastical courts in Renaissance Italy. (more…)

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The post The Economics of the Weird with Peter Leeson appeared first on The Economics Detective.