Utopia, you are standing in it!

Perhaps we should increase the age when one is eligible to run for Congress. AOC was apparently an excellent student. She graduated cum laude with a double major in international affairs and (snort) economics. But she was the youngest woman to be elected to Congress. She announced Friday that an explosion at a Philadelphia oil refinery was due to climate change, arguing that the incident underscores the urgency of her Green New Deal.  (A vat of butane ignited and eventually exploded at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refining Complex, followed by a series of smaller explosions through the pipes moving fuel around the complex. It injured five workers and took 120 firefighters to bring under control.)

You have noticed, I ‘m sure that AOC has become what is called “click bait”– that is, articles about her will be clicked on and partly read, which means that the advertisers’ ads will be…

Elinor Ostrom (“for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”) and Oliver E. Williamson (“for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm”) are the 2009 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

“Economic governance: the organization of cooperation

Elinor Ostrom has demonstrated how common property can be successfully managed by user associations. Oliver Williamson has developed a theory where business firms serve as structures for conflict resolution. Over the last three decades these seminal contributions have advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention.

Economic transactions take place not only in markets, but also within firms, associations, households, and agencies. Whereas economic theory has comprehensively illuminated the virtues and limitations of markets, it has traditionally paid less attention to other institutional arrangements. The research of Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson demonstrates that economic analysis can shed light on…

(Ellis Island, NY)

Recently I learned that the Trump administration finally concluded a tariff deal with Mexico which had a number of components related to illegal immigration into the United States.  Apart from Trump’s stupefying rhetoric surrounding his “wall” and other asinine comments like, “why are we having so many people from these shithole countries come here,” immigration and race have become litmus tests for certain politicians.  This political atmosphere in the United States makes Daniel Okrent’s new book, THE GUARDED GATE: BIGOTRY, EUGENICS, AND THE LAW THAT KEPT TWO GENERATIONS OF JEWS, ITALIANS, AND OTHER EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS OUT OF AMERICA an important contribution to the background history of our current views of people who are trying to escape tyranny and poverty and come to the United States.  Okrent focuses on what he describes as the “perverse form of ‘science’ [that] gave respectability to the drastic limits Imposed on the…

I have been reading the ideas of Steven N. S. Cheung for many years and have even written a few blog entries about him and his ideas. So it is my pleasure to repost my professional economist friend Zhaofeng Xue‘s English comment here in my blog. If you read Chinese, also read Zhaofeng’s longer posting “今年诺奖忽视了张五常的原创贡献” (evidences are the same).

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Repost from Zhaofeng Xue‘s English comment (Oct 13th, 1:56pm)

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I think Steven N. S. Cheung’s original insight on common property rights is unfortunately overlooked. The idea Nobel committee awarded on the basis of Ostrom’s 1990 publication can be clearly seen in Cheung’s earlier publication in 1974 and 1987. See the following four piece of evidence. (Zhaofeng Xue, Ph.D. from Mason)

Evidence 1:
Scientific Background on the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/ecoadv09.pdf

Elinor Ostrom (1990) has challenged the…

June 20, 2008 Update: Here are my initial random thoughts of the first two installments of Prof. Cheung’s “The Economic System of China”.

July 22, 2008 Update: Here is a link to various coverage of the 2008 Chicago Conference on China’s Economic Transformation including an indirect link to Prof. Ronald Coase’s Introduction at the conference. Enjoy.

Oct 7th, 2008 Update: I have blogged and referenced extensively about The Economic System of China, you can search for these blog entries by clicking here.

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Economics Nobel Prize winner Professor Ronald Coase (the Coase in Coase Theorem) is 96 years old and Professor Steven N S Cheung is younger at 71 years old. Both are well passed the retirement age but still are hard at work!

Coase is organizing a 2008 Chinese Economics Reform Symposium (my translation from “中 國 經 改 研 討 會 議”) and has personally…