From Verónica Bäcker-Peral and Benjamin Wittenbrink of MIT: Measuring real GDP growth requires distinguishing changes in prices from changes in product quality and composition, yet systematic quality adjustment of price indexes is unavailable for much of the twentieth century. We construct a new quality-adjusted price index for U.S. consumer goods using 5.1 million product listings…
Cataloging Growth: A Re-Evaluation of 1900–1990
Cataloging Growth: A Re-Evaluation of 1900–1990
25 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic growth, economic history, entrepreneurship, macroeconomics
Fixing Argentina’s Punitive Tax System
20 Jul 2026 1 Comment
in applied price theory, Austrian economics, development economics, economic growth, economic history, fiscal policy, growth disasters, macroeconomics Tags: Argentina
Almost exactly one year ago, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released this short video as part of a series on the additional reforms Javier Milei should implement to maximize Argentinian prosperity. Let’s take a closer look at the country’s tax policy, and I’ll start today’s column with an analogy. When Milei took office, Argentina […]
Fixing Argentina’s Punitive Tax System
Is Progress Sustainable? Mokyr’s Nobel Lecture
18 Jul 2026 1 Comment
in applied price theory, development economics, economic growth, economic history, entrepreneurship, history of economic thought, macroeconomics
“Progress” is a word that often generates both a lot of positive vibes, and also a lot of pushback? Progress toward what? At what cost? So it’s perhaps useful to specify that when I refer to “progress,” I’m referring to an overall movement toward good things of life: in no particular order, longer and healthier…
Is Progress Sustainable? Mokyr’s Nobel Lecture
The Great Enrichment continues
17 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation Tags: creative destruction, The Great Enrichment
Germany Needs Milei-ism but Is Getting Romney-ism
13 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in economic growth, economic history, economics of regulation, fiscal policy, macroeconomics Tags: Germany
In the past year, I’ve written about Germany’s fiscal deterioration and its costly fixation on net-zero environmentalism. As illustrated by the chart, these policies have contributed to malaise and economic stagnation (and were caused by – or contributed to – eroding societal capital). The good news is that Friedrich Merz, the country’s chancellor, wants economic […]
Germany Needs Milei-ism but Is Getting Romney-ism
How does an MP resign? The Chiltern Hundreds & the Manor of Northstead
09 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history Tags: British constitutional law
Have you just heard that an MP has resigned by ‘taking the Chiltern Hundreds’? Our Senior Research Fellow, Dr Martin Spychal, explains the practice and explores its historical context… MPs are not allowed to resign from Parliament. However, a parliamentary loophole exists that allows an MP to vacate their seat by asking the chancellor of…
How does an MP resign? The Chiltern Hundreds & the Manor of Northstead
The Troubled History of Government Equity in Technology
07 Jul 2026 1 Comment
in applied price theory, economic history, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, privatisation, Public Choice, rentseeking, survivor principle Tags: creative destruction, Germany
Even though Germany privatized Deutsche Telekom in 1996, the federal government retained a substantial ownership stake. This partial state ownership status, which remains to this day, presents a textbook example of how this type of arrangement distorts incentives and delays the competitive dynamism necessary for technological progress. Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Deutsche Telekom…
The Troubled History of Government Equity in Technology
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
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
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 1 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 entrepreneurship, taxation and investment, taxation and labour supply
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
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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