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Here they are, from earliest to latest:
- Greg Mankiw Gets It Partly Right, January 29.
- Green Airbnb, February 25.
- David Frum Accidentally Makes the Case for More Immigration, March 13.
- Henderson on Unintended Consequences of Grounding the Boeing 737 Max, March 20.
- Alan Reynolds Catches Shoddy Reporting About Federal Reserve Survey, May 6.
- Baseball Great Albert Pujols Defends Property Rights, May 10.
- Reflections on the Democratic Debate, July 31.
- You’re Not Using the Money for Anything, September 4.
- Paul Romer Likes Anarchy and Thinks It’s Government, September 5.
- Stoller’s Hatchet Job on Aaron Director, September 22.
I’m curious: what do EconLog readers think are some of my best for 2019?
Also Happy New Year to my co-bloggers, the people who work for Liberty Fund, and, last but not least, our EconLog readers.
READER COMMENTS
RPLong
Jan 2 2020 at 9:46am
Thinking back to all my favorite posts from the past year, I realized that everything that sprung to mind was an article you wrote elsewhere. I think that’s because you wrote some awesome articles this year. My favorites were The Balance Sheet of Supply-Side Economics, Universal Basic Income, In Perspective, and Sometimes Drug Prices Are Too Low.
As for blog posts, I’m a big Melville fan, so I loved your post, “Richard Posner is Wrong on Billy Budd.”
David Henderson
Jan 2 2020 at 11:00am
Thanks, RP. Interesting point about articles written elsewhere, typically, I bet, on the Hoover Defining Ideas site.
That makes sense. When I post on those articles, I give a few paragraphs in the hope that readers will click and read the whole article, something that you appear to have done. A typical post, with research and writing, takes me 3/4 of an hour to 1.5 hours. A typical article, with research and writing, takes me 6 to 8 hours. So it’s not surprising that the articles create more value. (I hasten to add that I’m not applying the labor theory of value here. The effort is not what’s valuable. I’m saying that when you put in more effort, you expect to produce more value.)
Re Posner on Billy Budd, thanks. I had been mulling that one over for years after I read something Megan McArdle wrote on it that I couldn’t track down. Then I found a reference to Posner where he was saying something similar.
Jon Murphy
Jan 2 2020 at 11:25am
I enjoyed this piece a lot: Does Losing Less Mean that You Are Winning? You highlight several important things in it:
1) The importance of clear language and clear writing
2) The importance of including all costs and benefits to all parties
3) The importance of reading source material
Jon Murphy
Jan 2 2020 at 11:31am
Two others I’d add are:
Adam Smith’s Beautiful Reductio ad Absurdum
The Biggest Losers?
David Henderson
Jan 2 2020 at 3:07pm
Good choice, Jon. If I had had a list of 15, this would have made it. And maybe it should have even made it into the top 10 because writing it was an experience of discovery. Notice the title, which doesn’t fit the content. I started with an idea and then read the underlying study more carefully, coming to a different conclusion than the one I started with.
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