Robots Are Nothing New
TweetHere’s my response to Jonathan Story (who commented on this earlier post): You write: “I wonder if, given growing roboticization of work, whether job loss among the least skilled is going to...
View ArticleOpen Letter to Stephen Hawking
TweetProf. Stephen Hawking Dear Prof. Hawking After reading your comments about technology creating mass unemployment and causing dangerous degrees of economic inequality in the absence of...
View ArticleYet Another Open Letter to Paul Krugman
TweetMr. Krugman: In your recent blogging effort to excuse those who oppose free trade, you write that “the case for trade liberalization relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute...
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TweetMatt Ridley champions free trade. A slice: Along came Adam Smith and made a different argument, that mercantilism punished consumers and the poor, while rewarding producers and the rich; that...
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TweetMark Perry reviews some vital economics of the minimum wage. Tyler Cowen’s pessimism might be fading! In this video, Naomi Brockwell Irina Alexandrovevskivich offers five reasons to vote for...
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TweetTyler Cowen correctly explains that even if government borrows at a zero percent real rate of interest the opportunity cost of that borrowing is not zero. Really, it’s not even close. Elaine...
View ArticleQuotation of the Day…
Tweet… is from page 463 of the final (2016) volume – Bourgeois Equality – of Deirdre McCloskey’s pioneering trilogy on the essence of bourgeois values, on their transmission, and on their essential...
View ArticleQuotation of the Day…
Tweet… is from page 35 of Richard Stroup’s 2003 book, Eco-nomics: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and the Environment: In a sense, the [market] value of a resource is a hostage that ensures...
View ArticleQuotation of the Day…
Tweet… is from page 332 of the 1990 Transaction Publishers reprint of W.H. Hutt‘s marvelous 1936 book, Economists and the Public: In spite of the perpetual recurrence of perturbation about the...
View ArticleDeirdre McCloskey in the New York Times
TweetMy old classmate and friend Roger Koppl alerted me to this essay in yesterday’s New York Times by Deirdre McCloskey. Here are some large selections (but do, by all means, read the whole thing):...
View ArticleQuotation of the Day…
Tweet… is from page 64 of the 2016 Mercatus Center re-issue of my late colleague Don Lavoie’s superb 1985 volume National Economic Planning: What Is Left? (original emphasis): A substantial degree of...
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TweetAlex Tabarrok extracts core passages from Gianni La Cava’s explanation of how restrictions on the supply of housing – including restrictions imposed by the state – drive much of the data that...
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TweetBjorn Lomborg sings the praises of the wide range of benefits, economic and ethical, of free trade. (I pick one small nit: although common, it is incorrect to say that “there are costs to free...
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TweetT. Norman Van Cott exposes the fallacy at the heart of the belief that humankind will be impoverished by robots doing jobs now done by workers. A slice: The flip-side of the scarcity proposition,...
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Quotation of the Day…
Tweet… is from page 66 of the 2016 revised and expanded edition of my Mercatus Center colleague Adam Thierer’s marvelous book, Permissionless Innovation (footnote deleted): Individual and societal...
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TweetIn this short video, Johan Norberg busts myths about building walls. Want to save wildlife? Promote economic growth, says Matt Ridley. (HT Warren Smith) A slice: The reason rich people are now...
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Quotation of the Day…
Tweet… is from page 630 of the final (2016) volume – Bourgeois Equality – of Deirdre McCloskey‘s brilliant trilogy on the essence of bourgeois values, on their transmission, and on their essential role...
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TweetAlberto Mingardi writes wisely about the recent Italian referendum: first here, then here. GMU Econ alum Liya Palagashvili has a splendid letter in today’s Wall Street Journal: A slice: [Adam]...
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TweetMy Mercatus Center colleague Dan Griswold has excellent further reflections on Trump’s Carrier deal. A slice: If the U.S. government, either through law or presidential threats, forbids U.S....
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TweetJohan Norberg’s new book, Progress, is reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. A slice from the review: Set against such misery [of the pre-industrial ages] are the advances of the modern era. At...
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