A Socialist Explains Why Socialism Can’t Work

Not that the socialist in question, Professor Richard D. Wolff, realises that’s what he’s doing in the Q&A video below – and he’s not talking about traditional Communist Command and Controlled Economies. What he’s actually describing is a very pure form of socialism, the sort only vaguely imagined by Marx, Engels and other communists when […]

A Socialist Explains Why Socialism Can’t Work

A Conversation with Gary Becker

Marx explained

https://www.facebook.com/share/fbKzhRKAFqpBfjDn/?mibextid=xfxF2i

Deirdre McCloskey: Innovation Begins in Our Minds

Cuba Libre

Martin Gurri has a very good, deep-dive on the current situation in Cuba. The wreckage of the Cuban economy really can’t be exaggerated. The perpetual blackouts are an apt symbol of a country that is headed for the dark ages. For the first time since the revolution, Cuba is begging the United Nations for food aid. Nearly […]

Cuba Libre

Productivity Syndrome and the Investment Prescription

Economic productivity is about growing the size of the pie. I sometimes point out that no matter what your goal–spending increases, tax cuts, greater support for the poor, environmental protection–that goal is easier when the economic pie is growing. When the economic pie isn’t growing, after all, then all priorities have to pit potential winners…

Productivity Syndrome and the Investment Prescription

Book review: The Worldly Philosophers

I just finished reading Robert Heilbroner’s excellent book The Worldly Philosophers. I forget who recommended it to me, but perhaps it was a mention in this blog by Dianne Coyle. Anyway, the book was first published in 1953 and has been through seven editions, with the last edition (which was the one I read) published…

Book review: The Worldly Philosophers

Claude 3 Opus does Austrian economics

TC: Let’s say you were Peter Boettke, and looking to pen a critique of Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship. You come from a slightly different branch of the Austrian school. How would you use that differential background to express your differences with the Kirznerian theory, which emphasizes alertness above all else as an entrepreneurial characteristic? “If […]

Claude 3 Opus does Austrian economics

100 Years of Rent Control in Sweden

Bet On It reader Vanja Månborg knows a lot about rent control in Sweden. If you think Sweden is a country of thoughtful technocrats where government intervention works well, reading his guest post may make you think again. Here’s Vanja:Sweden has had rent control regulations since 1917 with less than two decades of pause between…

100 Years of Rent Control in Sweden

An Open Letter to Nobel-laureate Economist Angus Deaton

TweetProf. Angus Deaton Princeton University Prof. Deaton: Over the years I’ve learned much from your writings, and I regard your 2013 The Great Escape as one of the most important books published in the past 15 years. So I was quite surprised and disappointed to read that you, as you say, are now “much more…

An Open Letter to Nobel-laureate Economist Angus Deaton

Claude 3 Opus Also Fails Steve Landsburg’s Economics Exam

Almost one year ago, Steve Landsburg tried GPT-4 on one of his exams. It failed, badly. I tried out some of the same questions on Claude 3 Opus, by many accounts now the leading AI. It failed, badly. Steve’s exams are very clever. They aren’t technically difficult but they are tricky in the sense that […]

Claude 3 Opus Also Fails Steve Landsburg’s Economics Exam

The RCT Agenda

Randomized Controlled Trials: Could you be any more scientific? The book I’m now writing, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, insists that the randomistas of the economics profession actually have a thinly-veiled political agenda. Namely: To get economists to humbly serve the demagogues that rule the world instead of bluntly challenging their unabated…

The RCT Agenda

‘Swiftonomics’ and the optimal number of Taylor Swift examples

I was interested to read this recent article on Inside Higher Education, about ‘Swiftonomics’:Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist, Nobel Prize winner and Distinguished Professor of economics at the CUNY Graduate Center, began working on the curriculum for the course last summer. Swift’s massive Eras Tour had just kicked off, creating such a frenzy…

‘Swiftonomics’ and the optimal number of Taylor Swift examples

This kind of macro theory is underrated

Demand shocks as technology shocks: We provide a macroeconomic theory where demand for goods has a productive role. A search friction prevents perfect matching between producers and potential customers. Larger demand induces more search, which in turn increases GDP and measured TFP. We embed the product-market friction in a standard neoclassical model and estimate it […]

This kind of macro theory is underrated

Four Myths about Price Discrimination

In an earlier post, Soda Prices are Too Low for the FTC, the Biden Administration seems to be trying to turn back the clock to a time when price discrimination was viewed as bad.  Lest we repeat the mistakes of the past, it is worthwhile to remember its lessons.    See this 2003 talk by some middling FTC…

Four Myths about Price Discrimination

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Offsetting Behaviour

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Researching the House of Commons, 1832-1868

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Small Steps Toward A Much Better World

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.

STOP THESE THINGS

The truth about the great wind power fraud - we're not here to debate the wind industry, we're here to destroy it.

Lindsay Mitchell

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Alt-M

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