EconLog Archive
Economic Growth
A Personal Reflection on a Half Century of Economic Progress
Many of us take so much for granted nowadays, from smartphones to good food to relatively cheap transportation to health care. So I thought it would be a good idea to report an imaginary conversation I would have if my brother, Paul, who committed suicide in July 1970 at age twenty-two, somehow showed up today .. MORE
Competition
The Market, Regulation’s Best Friend
Regulation hinders progress. But if regulation stays moderate, the market process can overcome detrimental regulation and ensure overall progress. And with this the market process quietly supports the popularity of regulation because it makes it seem as if regulation led to more wealth and progress. In a recent comment here on EconLog, user Mactoul made .. MORE
Cross-country Comparisons
Economic Freedom: Breaking the Culture of Welfare Dependency
Chief Jerry Asp says any community can change its destiny in a message that reverberates around the world For generations the Tahltan Nation of northern British Columbia (with a territory comprising 11% of the province’s landmass) endured the poverty and exclusion known to many First Nations in Canada. Inspired by the memory of a previously .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
Correlation and causation
The Economist has an interesting article on obesity. You may know that in earlier centuries the rich tended to be more obese, whereas today the correlation has flipped in many developed countries. What you may not know is that this new correlation is almost entirely driven by women: That poor people are more likely to .. MORE
#ReadWithMe
#ReadWithMe: Power Without Knowledge: Critiquing the Critique
Up until the previous posts in this series, I’ve simply done my best to try to accurately explain the views of Jeffrey Friedman, as he laid them out in his final book Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy. While I agree with much of what he writes, there are specific points where I think .. MORE
#ReadWithMe
Bruno Leoni and Judge Made Law
The first session of our virtual reading group on Bruno Leoni, last week, was exciting. We had many participants, and everybody had something interesting to say. I was pleased to see that Leoni’s book is still eliciting controversies and providing people with new ideas. I was particularly pleased that those who came from a legal .. MORE
Property Rights
Sasha Zbrozek’s Brazen Plan
“Homeowner invokes ‘builders remedy’ in brazen plan to build 20-unit housing complex in Los Altos Hills.” So reads the headline of a news story in the San Jose Mercury News, January 13. The homeowner involved is Sasha Zbrozek. Brazen? Wow! What does Zbrozek want to do with the housing complex? Rent it to dealers in .. MORE
Economic Philosophy
Did I Make an Anarcho-Capitalist out of ChatGPT?
I had a little “conversation” with ChatGPT about a deep problem in political philosophy. I showed him that it is logically contradictory to defend both majority power and individual rights. I used James Buchanan’s criterion of consent rather than the usual language of anarcho-capitalists, thereby offering the robot a possible way to reconcile constitutional democracy .. MORE
Behavioral Economics
What the Peltzman Effect Is and Isn’t
And a personal story. Peltzman’s second major contribution to the understanding of the unintended effects of regulation was his 1975 study of the effects on traffic safety of a slew of US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations on the design of cars. In the mid to late 1960s, the federal government made a .. MORE
Price Controls
Dutch housing shortage (TLDR)
Law & Liberty has a very informative article on the housing shortage in the Netherlands. There’s a great deal of detail about things like “social housing”. I worry, however, that some readers might get lost in the weeds. So here I will provide a shorter version of not only this article, but any article on .. MORE
Cross-country Comparisons
Argentina’s Comeback?
The world is used to watching economic crises unfold in Argentina time after time. In the past 50 years alone, the country has experienced three hyperinflations (1975, 1989 and 1990) and multiple major debt crises (like in 2001 and 2018). These have resulted not just in widespread poverty, but increasingly in emigration as well. As .. MORE
Economic Education
Damar Hamlin and Sam Peltzman: Where Football Meets Economics
Damar Hamlin’s shocking injury on the field on January 2nd has reignited debates about safety in the dangerous sport. Safety should be a top priority, but if the NFL or worse, lawmakers, decide to increase safety standards, they may increase critical injuries rather than decrease them. The key to this is the Peltzman Effect. In .. MORE
Cross-country Comparisons
Natural resources are overrated
When non-economists discuss the relative wealth of nations, they have a tendency to focus on each country’s endowment of natural resources. But there’s actually not much evidence that natural resources play a big role, except in a few cases of countries combining low populations with unusually large resource endowments (Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, etc.). Consider this .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Taxes, Tax Cuts, and Economic Growth
A review of Arthur B. Laffer, Brian Domitrovic, and Jeanne Cairns Sinquefield, Taxes Have Consequences: An Income Tax History of the United States, New York: Post Hill Press, 2022. As economists will tell you, the world runs on incentives. Human beings act rationally by making choices that have the greatest perceived value given all available .. MORE
Economics and Culture
Contra-Capitalism and the Failure of FTX
In my previous post, I outlined some of the possible explanations for spectacular business failures such as the recent collapse of the FTX crypto exchange. Which is the most plausible explanation? The Evidence So Far. Let us look at “the first rough draft” of FTX’s history and let us try to place the information .. MORE
Economic History
Now is the winter of our discontent…
On January 11 around 25,000 British ambulance workers went on strike, their second since December, in an ongoing pay dispute with the government. ‘Mature’ Brits are reminded of the (in)famous ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978/79 when the country suffered a wave of strikes as unions resisted the Labour government’s attempt to limit pay increases to .. MORE
Public Choice Theory
Misappropriating the FTX Scandal
“The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Samuel Bankman-Fried with orchestrating a scheme to defraud equity investors in FTX Trading Ltd. (FTX), the crypto trading platform of which he was the CEO and co-founder.”[i] That announcement from the SEC was released at 2:10 am Eastern Standard Time on the morning on December 13, 2022. Why .. MORE
Taxation
Taxing Wealth Is Taxing Work
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Biden stated: We have to reward work, not just wealth. Pass my proposal for the billionaire minimum tax. You know, there’s [sic] a thousand billionaires in America. It’s up from about 600 at the beginning of my term. But no billionaire should be paying .. MORE
Foreign Policy
Nationalism is a negative sum game
The Economist has a couple articles on the rise in economic nationalism, which make some important points: For many in Washington—both Democrats and Republicans—this new [protectionist] approach is common sense. It is, they believe, the only way that America can protect its industrial base, fend off the challenge from a rising China and reorient the .. MORE
#ReadWithMe
#ReadWithMe: Power Without Knowledge Part 9: What Friedman Gets Right
Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy is impressive in its scope and its argumentative strength. The book is a culmination of themes Friedman had been examining for years. As such, many of the arguments in the book were familiar to me, nonetheless, I still learned a lot by reading it. Some of .. MORE
Political Economy
ChatGPT and Economic Planning
Could artificial intelligence (AI) improve central economic planning as it was hoped that ordinary computers would do? Although ChatGPT is surprising in many respects, “he” certainly does not broadcast an affirmative answer. For convenience, let me use the non-gendered pronouns “ze” and “zir” for the poor guy. One basic economic problem is that an AI .. MORE