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Humans work in groups all the time. Indeed, I argue we are stronger because of it. Specialization and trade allows for a team to achieve things no individual could accomplish on their own. Economists since Adam Smith have highlighted the group efforts needed to produce even simple things such as wool coats, pencils, and bread. .. MORE
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Competition
Given the news that the U.S. Postal Service could be privatized, it’s a good time to explore why privatizing mail delivery and opening it up to market competition is a wise idea. To start, it’s helpful to consider cases where privatization might be unwise and why mail delivery is different. In particular, many economists and .. MORE
Economics of Crime
January 20th, 2025 was an unusual day. It’s not often that two different presidents engage in highly controversial acts on the very same day. I am referring to the flurry of pardons at the end of the Biden administration and the beginning of the Trump administration. America has become so polarized that it is hard .. MORE
Labor Market
In my recent post, The Wielders of One-Bladed Scissors, I talked about why supply-and-demand doesn’t automatically lead to the conclusion that the more workers there are, the lower wages become, and that it’s a fallacy to infer “more labor means cheaper labor.” After writing it up, a thought experiment occurred to me that helps make .. MORE
International Macroeconomics
For most of 2023, Javier Milei advocated a number of libertarian policies aimed at reversing Argentina’s long economically downward trend. Among them was a proposal that was noted for its difficulty in a country known for its ever-increasing level of public spending. ‘It can’t be done,’ they said. Yet he did it: Under the presidency .. MORE
Economic Education
[Editor’s note: We’re bringing back price theory with our series on Price Theory problems with Professor Bryan Cutsinger. You can view the previous problem and Cutsinger’s solution here and here. Share your proposed solutions in the Comments. Professor Cutsinger will be present in the comments for the next two weeks, and we’ll again post his proposed solution shortly thereafter. .. MORE
Politics and Economics
On December 21, 2024, my friend Dan Klein, an economics professor at George Mason University, sent out an email to a list that I’m no longer on but cc:ed me, with the following offer: Anyone want to give me 8:1 odds that on Jan 21 Trump won’t have been inaugurated? He linked to this .. MORE
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Browse our archive of posts by author last nameLabor Market
In my recent post, The Wielders of One-Bladed Scissors, I talked about why supply-and-demand doesn’t automatically lead to the conclusion that the more workers there are, the lower wages become, and that it’s a fallacy to infer “more labor means cheaper labor.” After writing it up, a thought experiment occurred to me that helps make .. MORE
International Trade
Regulations Keep Millions of Bedrooms Empty During a Housing Crisis by Howard Husock, Reason, January 17, 2025. Excerpts: The U.S. is facing a housing affordability crisis, and new data from Realtor.comhighlight an often missed contributing factor: millions of empty bedrooms. Census data reveal 31.8 million “excess” bedrooms in American homes—compared to just 4 million in .. MORE
History of Economic Thought
Fellow economist Susan Woodward sent me this anecdote about Ronald Coase and gambling that I thought worth sharing. It led me to remember my own interesting story about gambling and one famous economist. Bob Hall [her husband] and I were talking about the 1987 Coase conference at Yale, which I attended but Bob did not. .. MORE
So we have a way of telling which political activists actually care about society and which are merely trying to portray themselves as caring: The ones who actually care will exert significant effort to make sure that their beliefs are correct. —Michael Huemer, Progressive Myths,1 p. 212 Michael Huemer believes that some important components of .. MORE
H.G. Wells Best known today for science fiction novels such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells was in his own day widely regarded as a prophet. Trained in science, he predicted the wireless telephone, directed energy weapons such as the laser, and the production of human-animal .. MORE
Under a gold standard, government bonds are nearly free of inflation risk but not of default risk. Under a fiat standard, the reverse is true. ——White, Lawrence H. Better Money: Gold Fiat or Bitcoin? (pp. 214-215).1 In his new book, Lawrence H. White compares three possible monetary systems: a gold standard, a fiat money standard, .. MORE
Carl Menger Is 1871 the most important year in the history of social science? I think so. That year, Austrian financial journalist Carl Menger published his Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre—or Principles of Economics. Later that year another eminent British economist, William Stanley Jevons, published his Theory of Political Economy. Both treatises offered a (similar) solution to .. MORE
I was thinking more about real property ie land and not pretty thefts. You have to live in a country where this service is not well-provided to truly appreciate this service.
Mactoul, January 12