The NIMBY Prisoner’s Dilemma

He lost his childhood homes, dozens of family members, and most of his hearing in his left ear to Israeli bombs, yet Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib insists that Palestinians must also take responsibility for Gaza’s destruction and for peace. Most Gazans, he insists, have turned against Hamas for oppressing them, enriching itself, and bringing catastrophe to… MORE

Sam Enright works on innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent policy think tank in Dublin, and runs a publication called The Fitzwilliam. Most relevant to us, on his personal blog, he writes a popular link roundup; what follows is an abridged version of his Links for July. Blogs and short links 1. Questions that… MORE

Has the earth been visited by extraterrestrials? Are we alone? Despite no formal evidence for conscious life outside of earth, the belief that we are not alone has become more common among both scientists and everyday people. Listen as author Adam Kirsch talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the urge to believe that there… MORE

Question: Housing is a highly durable good and often lasts for many decades. Consider the housing market in Cleveland. Suppose that in 2026: Cleveland has 250,000 existing homes, all built before the year 2000. Homes never depreciate. No new homes have been built in Cleveland over the past 26 years. The marginal cost of building… MORE

A recent post argued that housing affordability is not so bad as it might appear when home prices are adjusted for all relevant factors, such as size, quality, and household income growth. While houses have become more expensive in dollars, they are also significantly bigger and nicer, and the average household has significantly more income.… MORE

If there’s one thing we can count on in America, it’s that our elected officials will see an affordability crisis and respond to it by stimulating the demand side of the market.  Today, we’re seeing this in the case of the housing industry, with Administration officials floating both a new (and improved!) 50-year mortgage and… MORE

Israel Kirzner, Professor Emeritus at NYU, is among the foremost scholars in the continuing development of the Austrian school of economic theory. He has extended our understanding of the workings of a free society, illuminated the role of entrepreneurs in the process of economic discovery, and shed new light on the dynamics of market forces.… MORE

A professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and a primary figure in Chicago School Economics and in the field of Law and Economics, Harold Demsetz has contributed original research on the theory of the firm, regulation in markets, industrial organization, antitrust policy, transaction costs, externalities, and… MORE

Nobel laureate Ronald H. Coase (1910-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Coase’s articles, “The Problem of Social Cost” and “The Nature of the Firm” are among the most important and most often cited works in the whole of economic literature. Coase recounts how he tried to encourage… MORE

Abba Lerner was the milton friedman of the left. Like Friedman, Lerner was a brilliant expositor of economics who was able to make complex concepts crystal clear. Lerner was also an unusual kind of socialist: he hated government power over people’s lives. Like Friedman, he praised private enterprise on the ground that “alternatives to government… MORE

  Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist, made an international reputation with his 1944 book, An American Dilemma, today considered a classic in sociology. The book was the end product of a study that the Carnegie Corporation had commissioned about what was then called the “Negro question.” Myrdal’s damning critique of the “separate but equal” doctrine… MORE

Jagdish Bhagwati Introduction Economist Jagdish Bhagwati has made fundamental contributions to the studies of international trade, tariffs and quotas, and of industrial development. One of his most important contributions on tariffs was to show that when markets suffer from distortions or government policies cause distortions in a domestic economy, tariffs are never the best solution;… MORE