Saturday, January 27, 2007

Revealed Preferences in Venezuela

Experimental economics is usually treated with suspicion by mainstream economists because it relies upon behaviour in the artificial circumstances of the lab or upon survey data where people may not understand the question or how they might actually react in the situation they are asked to imagine.

That's why this statistic is interesting:
"Number of Venezuelans seeking asylum in the United States in 1997, the year before Hugo Chavez came to power? 9

Number of Venezuelans seeking asylum in the United States in 2004 and 2005? More than 2,000."


That's violations of people's liberty in action; that's a revealed preference to avoid the tyranny of Chavez. It's like the old retort to any socialist lunatic enough to argue Cubans have it better off than Americans "yeah, that's why all the Americans are trying to escape across the Gulf of Mexico on a floating door".

2 comments:

Meg said...

word.

Anonymous said...

well said..
ps..enjoy yor blog