In “Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization,” Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz ask when joint production works better inside a firm than across markets, and what form that firm takes. Their answers turn on a measurement problem: When people produce together, total output doesn’t reveal what each person contributed. Measuring individual contributions is costly, and…
Ani O’Brien writes – Compassion for me, contempt for thee: Chloe Swarbrick and the politics of selective compassion. When a man approached the home of New Zealand First leader Winston Peters with a crowbar last year, Peters was not home. However, when the man shattered a window sending glass raining down on Kobe the black […]
Since we are all comparativists on this blog, I [Yibo] am comparing Israel to the ongoing Swedish government formation. The 2026 Swedish election was fought clearly between two blocs of four parties each.
The movie “Paging Hezbollah” came out two days ago, and it’s a film worth noting, as Liel Leibovitz has done at the Free Press. I don’t know if it will be available on Netflix, but for sure you won’t find it at the local theater, nor will you see it reviewed in the NYT (I…
I was saddened to hear of the passing of William Nordhaus last Friday. Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in 2018 “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis”, and it is his work on climate change and economics that he might be best known for. However, that was far from his only contribution to economics.…
Jerry Coyne writes – One of the most-cited empirical achievements of indigenous peoples is the ability of Polynesians, Melanesians, and Micronesians to navigate their way across vast, unmarked expanses of the Pacific Ocean to get to small, uninhabited islands. How did they do it? And, regardless of their navigational methods, how many attempted voyages failed, […]
In the dying embers of the Third Reich, when the skies above Germany burned red and the cities lay in ruins, the last defenders of Adolf Hitler’s empire were not seasoned soldiers—but children.Boys who only months earlier had drilled with wooden rifles now faced tanks and artillery. Their voices had barely deepened, yet they screamed […]
A suburban Chicago man has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for conspiring to stage armed robberies so that the purported victims could apply for U.S. immigration visas reserved for crime victims. From 2022 to 2024, PARTH NAYI organized and participated in hundreds of staged armed robberies at coffee shops, restaurants, liquor stores, and gas…
As part of my 2017 series on the tragic history of communism, I wrote a column about the bizarre affection on the left for Che Guevara. Why is it bizarre? Well, watch this video. I hardly need to add anything. Che Guevara was a reprehensible human being. So the rest of this column will recycle […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
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