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It was a fact universally acknowledged that a young man or woman in 1800s Lancashire could find gainful employment as a weaving apprentice. In the pre-factory cottage industry, a weaving family would typically own one handloom. With the dawn of mechanised wool spinning, plenty of jobs became available for the young and willing to upskill. .. MORE
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Macroeconomics
This year, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, colloquially called the Nobel Prize in Economics, went to Robert E. Hall of Stanford University and Michael Woodford of Columbia University for their work in “microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization.” Those five words do not adequately describe their contributions. Hall and .. MORE
Finance
An ordinary person can earn a paycheque, pay her taxes, cover living costs and mortgage payments, and perhaps even add to her savings — and at the end of the day she will still owe most of her mortgage. This is a normal state of affairs, and nobody finds it puzzling. Yet when a company .. MORE
Austrian Economics
Reading Dean Ball’s recent essay “On the Loose” has me thinking about an old idea in a new light. Ball asks us to imagine a world containing “self-sovereign” AI agents. These are not simply chatbots we rent by the month. They are agents capable of operating independently, acquiring the computer they need to keep running, .. MORE
Politics and Economics
We are living through a great social transformation comparable to the industrial revolution. What sets it apart is not only its magnitude, but its multidimensional convergence: technological, economic, political, and epistemic shifts unfolding simultaneously and reinforcing one another. This shift places growing strain on inherited political cleavages and ideological frameworks, many forged under very different .. MORE
Business Economics
How does anything get built? What are the political precursors to development? Michael Munger has an interesting, and at times persuasive, argument that self-interest combines with particular institutional designs, such as public hearings, to create a prisoner’s dilemma where everyone knows that development is in aggregate desirable but wants that development to be in the .. MORE
Business Economics
On a chilly Thursday evening last December, citizens in Dorr, Michigan, a small community about a half-hour south of Grand Rapids, attended a town hall meeting to discuss the possible construction of a data center on the north end of town. Some of the attendees came from families who had lived in Dorr for generations .. MORE
Entrepreneurship
Adam Smith articulated the rhetoric of the Bourgeois Deal by highlighting fundamental differences among commercial, political, and martial societies. Everyone, he argued, is always practicing oratory on others and trying to persuade them to cooperate: “give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want.” Luke Froeb and his coauthors in .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Commenting on this post, commentor Warren Platts writes (emphasis added): You economists can debate amongst yourselves about how trade deficits don’t matter. But your debates are what don’t matter now. Now we need to just get this done, come hell or high water. Your job now, as an experienced economist, is to tell us how .. MORE
Labor Market
It’s easy to doomscroll these days. AI, it appears, is coming for our jobs. Even occupations that were previously considered an easy path to a middle-class lifestyle, like lawyer and radiologist, may be subject to the AI chopping block. Yet these stories, despite their flashy headlines, are missing nuance. They examine the seen (and likely) .. MORE
Who defines and enforces property rights? If you are the average person, an undergraduate student, or even a mainstream economics professor, that answer is easy: the government. Look it up! Municipal and county governments determine the deeds to your property and various usage rights including wetland setbacks and easements. State governments create regulations that affect .. MORE
IT GIVES me great satisfaction to see this book, handsomely printed by a distinguished publishing house, appear in its third revised edition. Two terminological remarks may be in order. First, I employ the term “liberal” in the sense attached to it everywhere in the nineteenth century and still today in the countries of continental Europe. .. MORE
This attitude… is based on the belief that “the difficulties and disorders of humankind can be overcome by some large-scale adjustment: it suffices to devise a new arrangement, a new system, and people will be released from their temporary prison into a realm of success.” —Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a .. MORE
John Stuart Mill was my companion for more than three years, while I was writing my dissertation on what I called his New Political Economy (1965, 1972). Every generation, every school of economists, has the ambition to rewrite economics. The case of Mill was a special one. Analytically speaking he was the last of the .. MORE
Productivity increasing isn't the only source of wage increase, but it is the major one. I also argue that there is productivity increases in the Cost Disease, but that's for another time.
Jon Murphy, February 20