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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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Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Daron Acemoglu won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024 and is the third most cited economist of all time. Thus, the paradox of his new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, is that its most serious analytic failures are economic. He provides a sincere and serious consideration of modern liberalism’s estrangement from the working .. MORE
Uncategorized
In the last thirty years or so, the United States has seen persistent shortages of housing, waste disposal facilities, electricity generation, and oil refineries. More recently, we have begun to see the difficulties in building data centers, portending new shortages. This is confusing in a wealthy nation. A “shortage” occurs when there is too little .. MORE
Sam's Links
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
Game Theory
People conspire all the time. Firms collude. Politicians bargain behind closed doors. Militaries deceive their enemies. But other conspiracies are detected, or they do not last long. Why do some remain secret while others are revealed? A simple game theory model can help illustrate that the probability of a conspiracy being revealed depends on the .. MORE
Liberty
I. Atlas Shrugged in Brazil In 1988, when I was 27 years old, I read Ayn Rand for the first time. It was her novel Atlas Shrugged, in its just-released Portuguese edition. At that time, I already considered myself a sort of classical liberal, but my superficial knowledge of political philosophy, among many other gaps .. MORE
Labor Market
In the good old days, dump trucks came in one discrete unit. Nowadays, they pull trailers with as much cubic space as themselves. Once upon a time, buses, too, were constituted in a fairly modest vehicle. Today, they are double their previous size. Half as many drivers are now required to pilot these roadway behemoths. .. MORE
Labor Market
This month, amid World Cup fever, New York City implemented a new job-protection law. This law forbids app-based rideshare platforms from removing drivers unless they can show they have “just cause” or a “bona fide economic reason.” The new law follows a pattern set by a similar pandemic-era law, also from New York City, which .. MORE
Economics of Education
Like just about every college professor, I give my students a syllabus at the beginning of the semester. However, I write my syllabus like a contract. It is split into sections with clauses. The sections detail various aspects of the class (location, topic list, etc.) but also highlight important policies (late policy, exam make-up, grading .. MORE
Economic Education
A new paper by Elliot Ash (ETH Zurich), Daniel L Chen (Toulouse School of Economics), and Suresh Naidu (Columbia University) in the Quarterly Journal of Economics discusses the impact of the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges on judicial rulings (“Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice“). From their abstract: .. MORE
After months of debate, and substantial changes along the way, this summer Congress successfully enacted a landmark package of tax and spending cuts, a key component of Donald Trump’s legislative agenda. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” (HR 1) will reduce taxes by around $4.5 trillion while also cutting roughly $1.5 trillion in federal spending. It is .. MORE
Social Security is in the news again. Given its “pay-as-you-go” structure and demographic trends, over the years analysts have warned of the impending Social Security crisis. The difference is that now the financial day of reckoning looms quite close. “Fortunately, there is a ‘win-win’ method that can ease the fiscal crunch while benefiting the government’s .. MORE
Introduction Critics of capitalism have raised many objections to the market economy. For example, Marxists claim that workers are systematically exploited because they are paid less than the full value of their labor. Meanwhile, progressives typically believe that the rich should “give back to the community” that has showered such blessings and privilege upon them. .. MORE
IN this book I have endeavored to determine whether protection or free trade better accords with the interests of labor, and to bring to a common conclusion on this subject those who really desire to raise wages.I have not only gone over the ground generally traversed, and examined the arguments commonly used, but, carrying the .. MORE
Hi there. I enjoyed the simplicity of your model. How do you think it stands up in an authoritarian setting?
Andrea Goden, August 30