Questions & Answers

The Fiscal Power Law — 45 questions.

  1. Government is a brake. Here's the math.
  2. The economic theory that gave politicians cover to spend more — and got the data wrong
  3. Is your government quietly making you poorer?
  4. Every economist says there's a 'sweet spot' for government size. The data says there isn't.
  5. If government spending always slows growth, what is it actually good for?
  6. The Nordic countries are rich and spend 50% of GDP. Doesn't that disprove everything?
  7. Why do economists keep using a model they know is wrong?
  8. South Korea grew at 9% with an interventionist state. Doesn't that break the theory?
  9. Governments used to spend 12% of GDP. Growth was faster. What happened?
  10. What about countries with almost no government? Don't they just collapse?
  11. If government is a brake on growth, when should it actually press the pedal?
  12. GDP went up. Natural capital fell 40%. Which number should we believe?
  13. One diagram reduces all of politics to four cells. Three of them say: do nothing.
  14. Two questions that determine whether government has any business intervening
  15. The textbook Armey Curve predicts negative growth rates. Why is it still in textbooks?
  16. One number explains 42% of why some countries grow and others stagnate
  17. How do you choose between economic models when they all fit the data badly?
  18. Maybe rich countries just choose bigger governments. How do we know which way the arrow points?
  19. Canada, Sweden, Estonia, Ireland all cut spending and boomed. Coincidence?
  20. What if France can't cut spending? There's a slower path — and the math is brutal.
  21. France cuts 5 points of spending. Why does growth barely move?
  22. How fast would the economy grow with zero government? Here's the model's answer.
  23. The problem isn't that government slows the economy. It's that it slows all of it equally.
  24. Who counts as a victim? The legal definition that decides everything.
  25. Run a coal subsidy through the math. How fast does it fail?
  26. Is funding science a legitimate use of coercion? The criterion gives a complicated answer.
  27. Salt iodisation costs $0.05 per person and raises IQ by up to 15 points. How does that score?
  28. Where does the criterion break down? Four cases it can't cleanly resolve.
  29. This framework claims to be objective. Here's where that claim gets shaky.
  30. The short list of things that actually deserve to be taxed — and the long list that don't
  31. France collects €33B/year from fuel taxes — and can't afford for people to stop buying fuel
  32. There's one policy tool that self-enforces, can't be captured, and costs the Treasury nothing
  33. When is it enough to act alone — and when does unilateral action just shift the damage elsewhere?
  34. Won't taxing pollution just send factories to countries that don't?
  35. A simple test for whether your government is doing its job or overstepping it
  36. What evidence would prove this entire framework wrong?
  37. Pareto, Zipf, firm sizes — why does the same math keep appearing everywhere in economics?
  38. How a 1980s economic model gave cover to 40 years of government expansion
  39. An economic model that predicts impossible results. Why is it still the mainstream view?
  40. Government size explains 42% of growth differences. What explains the other 58%?
  41. 151 countries, 18 years of data. Where does it all come from?
  42. Why removing 38 countries from the sample makes the signal twice as strong
  43. We doubled produced capital and destroyed 40% of natural capital. The GDP chart looked fine.
  44. Three countries that spend government money differently — and consistently beat the growth curve
  45. The UK Treasury commissioned a review that concluded GDP is the wrong number to optimise