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Consider the following tweet: When I moved to Massachusetts in 1982, major cities such as Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline had rent control. Massachusetts is also one of the most Democratic states in the country. Today, Massachusetts doesn’t have rent control. So how did that happen? In 1994, Massachusetts had a referendum on rent control, and voters .. MORE
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Economic History
The Roman Empire was in trouble. During the fifty-plus years known as the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284 AD), the throne of Rome changed some 26 times, with the Roman Army engaging in a steady diet of crowning and removing claimants to the throne. These autocrats, known as “barracks emperors,” because they often came .. MORE
#ReadWithMe
At the end of my last post, I said I’d be following up by describing both some of Musa al-Gharbi’s modes of analysis and assumptions in his book We Have Never Been Woke, and outline who is the “we” he describes, and what he means by “woke.” First, the ground rules. Musa al-Gharbi sets out .. MORE
Economic Growth
On July 26, Joshua Rauh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, testified at the Reagan Library before the House Ways and Means Committee. I learned a lot from his testimony and want to share it. Here are some highlights. A growing economy is essential for expanding economic opportunity for all Americans. It is deeply .. MORE
Law and Economics
In our forthcoming paper at the Review of Law & Economics, “The Long-Term Impact of Kelo v. City of New London: Comparing State Legislative and Judicial Responses”, my former Western Carolina University colleagues Ed Lopez and H. Justin Pace and I discuss justifications for eminent domain.[1] Primarily, we discuss the holdout problem. The holdout problem .. MORE
Economic Methods
In my first year of grad school, one of my professors had a long list of “forbidden words”. These were terms that do more to confuse than enlighten when used in economic analysis. Terms like “need”, “afford”, “exploits”, “vicious circle”, etc. Today, I’ll argue that we might wish to add the term “must” to that .. MORE
Economic Education
We’re bringing back price theory with our series on Price Theory problems with Professor Bryan Cutsinger. You can see all of Cutsinger’s problems and solutions by subscribing to his EconLog RSS feed. Share your proposed solutions in the Comments. Professor Cutsinger will be present in the comments for the next couple of weeks, and we’ll post his .. MORE
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Time again for another one of my multi-post deep dives into a book I found interesting. This time, the book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi. As always, my next several posts will be my attempts to reflect al-Gharbi’s views rather than my own, and .. MORE
Economics of Health Care
Meet the Medicaid Double-Dippers by the Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2025. Excerpt: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported late last week that 1.2 million Americans last year were enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in two or more states. The agency worked with software engineers .. MORE
Liberty
I fear we have to admit it: there is not a single truly free country among the 200 or so that occupy this planet. If there were one, we would have expected a representative of its state to declare publicly, about the current trade war, something like the following—let me put it in blockquote even .. MORE
James Buchanan Virginia Political Economy was born in the foyer of the Social Science Building at the University of Chicago early in 1948. In a casual conversation with a fellow graduate student, Warren Nutter, I discovered that we shared an evaluation and diagnosis of developments in Economics, the discipline with which we were about to .. MORE
In June 1974 the Institute for Humane Studies sponsored the first of a series of conferences on Austrian economics. This conference was held at Royalton College in South Royalton, Vermont, and attracted some fifty participants from all regions of the United States and three continents abroad. The conferees came to hear Israel M. Kirzner, Ludwig .. MORE
Experiments consistently reveal that our moral judgments are driven by perceptions of harm. We condemn acts based on how much they seem to victimize someone vulnerable. —Kurt Gray, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground1 (page 8) In his book, Outraged, Kurt Gray studies the psychology of moral .. MORE
A Book Review of The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, by Thomas Philippon.1 The Great Reversal defends a provocative and surprising thesis: the United States has given up on free markets while Europe has embraced them. As a result, Europeans pay less and get more in a lot of industries, like .. MORE
What percent of landlords and developers are neither homeowners nor renters? I could imagine there are a few, but people with such unusual lifestyles are very rare. Probably far less than the 1% that the..
Robert EV, July 26