Rent control is in the news again. Check out my new website, Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap. Here is just one bit: Norway abolished its rent control in 1982, and the economist Are Oust realized the newspapers had been quietly recording the whole experiment. He collected housing classifieds from Oslo’s Aftenposten from 1970 to 2008 and watched…
Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap
Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap
02 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, economics of regulation, law and economics, property rights Tags: rent control
Typewriters and fertility
01 Jul 2026 1 Comment
in discrimination, economic history, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice Tags: economics of fertility
Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed…
Typewriters and fertility
Pre-market societies could sometimes have alot of violence
01 Jul 2026 1 Comment
in economic history, economics of crime, law and economics Tags: evolutionary anthropology
Non-capitalist or pre-capitalist societies can have quite a bit of violence. The first quote comes from The Making of Economic Society, 13e by Robert L. Heilbroner and William Milberg. “It is difficult for us to reconstruct the violent tenor of much of feudal life, but one investigator has provided a statistic that may serve to…
Pre-market societies could sometimes have alot of violence
IKE AND WINSTON: WORLD WAR, COLD WAR, AN EXTRAORDINARY FRIENDSHIP by Jonathan W. Jordan
26 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in defence economics, economic history, war and peace Tags: World War II
(Churchill and Eisenhower) Jonathan W. Jordan has written a superbly blended dual biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Winston S. Churchill entitled IKE AND WINSTON:WORLD WAR, COLD WAR, AN EXTRAORDINARY FRIENDSHIP. He focuses on their relationship from the time they met in 1941 carrying through World War II and the Cold War. It is carefully […]
IKE AND WINSTON: WORLD WAR, COLD WAR, AN EXTRAORDINARY FRIENDSHIP by Jonathan W. Jordan
The Partition: Ireland Divided 1885 to 1925 by Charles Townshend (2021)
23 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in defence economics, economic history, economics of crime, law and economics, war and peace Tags: Ireland
‘None of the Irish leaders understood the northern situation or the northern mind.’ (Cahir Healy, Irish nationalist born in Ulster, quoted on this book’s last page)) This ought to be a great book – a long, scholarly, up-to-date and immensely detailed description of the social, economic and cultural reasons why Ireland was partitioned. All the […]
The Partition: Ireland Divided 1885 to 1925 by Charles Townshend (2021)
Slow Growth: Mexico Edition
23 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, economics of regulation, labour economics, Public Choice Tags: Mexico
For the last eight years or so, going back before the pandemic, Mexico’s economy has been growing at 1% per year or less, which is barely faster than the population of Mexico has been growing. It is a fact of arithmetic that an upper-middle-income country, as Mexico is classified by the World Bank, will not…
Slow Growth: Mexico Edition
Ancient Clay Tablets Show Markets Worked 4,000 Years Before Economists Explained Them
21 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, Austrian economics, development economics, economic history, history of economic thought, international economics, law and economics, property rights
Clay tablets unearthed in Asia Minor reveal a sophisticated commercial order emerging spontaneously nearly four thousand years before economists explained how markets work. By Surse Pierpoint of The American Institute for Economic Research.”A clay tablet from Kanesh, in what is now central Turkey, contains the founding charter of a twelve-partner trading company. Twelve merchants pooled thirty-three…
Ancient Clay Tablets Show Markets Worked 4,000 Years Before Economists Explained Them
A Nordic Nightmare for AOC
19 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic growth, economic history, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, Marxist economics, politics - USA Tags: taxation and labour supply, taxation and entrepreneurship, taxation and investment
In 2015, I wrote a column entitled “A Nordic Nightmare for Bernie Sanders.” Today, let’s do something similar, but this time I’ll explain why economic data from northernmost Europe is bad news for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’m motivated to address the issue because I just saw this tweet about how Scandinavian-Americans are much richer than their […]
A Nordic Nightmare for AOC
Quotation of the Day…
15 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, history of economic thought, labour economics, labour supply, unions
Tweet… is from page 88 of Art Carden’s and Ilia Murtazasvili’s paper “W.H. Hutt: An Economist for the Twenty-First Century,” which is a chapter in 2026 book Unsung Heroes of the Market: The 24 Underrated Economists You Need to Know – a volume edited by Robert Whaples, Christopher Coyne, Gregory Robson, and Diana Thomas [original emphasis;…
Quotation of the Day…
The History of Greenpeace: The Evolution of Green Extremism
14 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of climate change, economics of crime, economics of regulation, energy economics, environmental economics, environmentalism, global warming, International law, law and economics, Marxist economics, politics - USA, property rights Tags: nuisance suits, climate activists
The era of unchecked “activism” that masks itself as science while practicing inhumane sabotage is reaching its end. We are witnessing the slow, painful process of reality catching up to the Greenpeace propaganda. And frankly, it’s about time. The post The History of Greenpeace: The Evolution of Green Extremism appeared first on Watts Up With…
The History of Greenpeace: The Evolution of Green Extremism
Safety and nation-building in Mexico
14 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history, economics of crime, growth disasters, law and economics Tags: economics of prohibition, Mexico
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt: Consider the special nature of Mexican politics. First and foremost, Mexico is still not a mature nation-state. By one estimate, drug gangs may control as much as one-third of its territory. That might sound bizarre, but from the standpoint of Mexican history,…
Safety and nation-building in Mexico
Piketty’s Eco-Marxist Utopia: Why Degrowth and Global Redistribution Will Trap the Poor in Poverty
13 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, development economics, econometerics, economic growth, economic history, economics of climate change, economics of regulation, energy economics, environmental economics, environmentalism, fiscal policy, global warming, human capital, income redistribution, industrial organisation, international economics, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, Public Choice, public economics Tags: climate activists, climate alarmism, regressive left
The world’s poor deserve better than another utopia designed for them by the globalist intelligentsia. They deserve cheap energy, open markets, secure property rights, and the freedom to industrialise on terms they choose for themselves. That is what worked in East Asia. It is what will work in South Asia, Africa and Latin America. And…
Piketty’s Eco-Marxist Utopia: Why Degrowth and Global Redistribution Will Trap the Poor in Poverty
Dr Ruth—Holocaust Survivor, Sex Therapist and Sniper
13 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of education
Ruth Westheimer (June 4, 1928 – July 12, 2024), widely known as Dr. Ruth, was an American sex therapist, media personality, and author. The New York Times described her as a “Sorbonne-trained psychologist who became a cultural icon in the 1980s,” noting that she “ushered in a new age of freer, franker talk about sex […]
Dr Ruth—Holocaust Survivor, Sex Therapist and Sniper
Why Everything Feels More Expensive (hedonic adaptation)
12 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic growth, economic history, economics of media and culture, macroeconomics
Middle-class Americans have more income than they did 50 years ago, but the squeeze is realBy Roland Fryer. He is a professor of economics at Harvard. Excerpts: “Before indicting the economy, consider what 50 years of growth actually delivered. The car in your driveway is far less likely to kill you than its 1975 counterpart—traffic fatalities…
Why Everything Feels More Expensive (hedonic adaptation)
A weird way of slicing the stats
12 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, discrimination, econometerics, economic history, economics of education, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice
Ages ago I supervised a superb Honours thesis, which turned into a Masters, looking at the lesbian wage premium. It showed up regularly in the US data: homosexual women earned more than heterosexual women – the opposite of the pattern that obtains for men. I was curious whether the difference could in part be due to…
A weird way of slicing the stats
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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