The secular decline in birth rates across the globe over the past seven decades has slowed population growth, raised average ages, and reshaped labor markets and the macroeconomy. Contrary to the widespread expectation that these trends hamper economic growth, we find lower birth rates are associated with higher growth in GDP per working-age adult across…
Do falling birth rates boost per capita income?
Do falling birth rates boost per capita income?
06 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, econometerics, economic growth, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics Tags: economics of fertility
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
Watermelon Economics
16 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in development economics, fiscal policy, human capital, income redistribution, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, poverty and inequality, Public Choice Tags: development aid, regressive left, taxation and entrepreneurship, taxation and investment, top 1%
Remember Thomas Piketty, the pro-class-warfare economist who is infamous for shoddy analysis and who also made a fool of himself by asserting back in 2023 that Javier Milei’s election in Argentina would lead to economic disaster? Yes, that Thomas Piketty. It turns out he’s also a “watermelon,” which is the derisive term for leftists who […]
Watermelon Economics
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
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
Abolishing HR
05 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in entrepreneurship, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, managerial economics, organisational economics, personnel economics
News.com.au reports: A high-profile tech CEO has sparked debate after revealing he quietly axed his entire human resources department earlier this year. Ryan Breslow, CEO of Bolt Financial, claims the HR team at the fintech firm was “creating problems that didn’t exist” and fostering a culture of complaining rather than productivity. “The problems disappeared when…
Abolishing HR
The (Amusingly) Destructive Economics of Wealth Taxation
24 May 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic growth, entrepreneurship, fiscal policy, human capital, income redistribution, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, poverty and inequality, Public Choice, public economics Tags: taxation and entrepreneurship, taxation and investment, taxation and labour supply
I’ve shared several columns (here, here, here, here, and here) reviewing scholarly research on the harmful economic impact of wealth taxation. From now on, however, I think I’ll simply share this clever video from the folks at Reason. The video uses humor to make very important points about how a wealth tax would diminish incentives […]
The (Amusingly) Destructive Economics of Wealth Taxation
The AI Jobs Panic Comes to Sacramento
23 May 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic growth, entrepreneurship, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, market efficiency, occupational choice, survivor principle, theory of the firm
California has seen the future of work, and Sacramento’s first instinct is to convene 14 task forces about it. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-6-26 today, setting California’s workforce agencies in motion on directives involving research reviews, revisions to the state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, studies of new safety-net programs, a…
The AI Jobs Panic Comes to Sacramento
Technological unemployment in Victorian Britain
29 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, econometerics, economic history, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice Tags: creative destruction
We do not know whether technological unemployment swept across England in the wake of the British Industrial Revolution. In this paper, I propose an approach to quantify jobs lost to, and created by, creative destruction in the 19th century. Using over 170 million individual records from the full-count British census (1851–1911), I generate sub-industry “task”…
Technological unemployment in Victorian Britain
The Washington Post vs Elizabeth Warren
25 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economics of media and culture, fiscal policy, human capital, income redistribution, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, politics - USA, Public Choice, public economics Tags: taxation and entrepreneurship, taxation and investment, taxation and labour supply
People sometimes will get excited about big-picture tax fights – whether politicians should raise taxes, whether they should add a VAT, or whether they should scrap the IRS for a flat tax. On the other had, there are a handful of tax issues that induce drowsiness but are nonetheless very important for purposes of tax […]
The Washington Post vs Elizabeth Warren
Does this have implications for higher ed in particular?
20 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in economics of education, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, population economics
Declining fertility and population loss pose significant challenges for state and federal local governments responsible for providing a range of services to citizens, including education, health care, and infrastructure. Indeed, many areas are already experiencing outright population decline, with roughly half of U.S. counties losing population between 2010 and 2020. This paper examines how shrinking…
Does this have implications for higher ed in particular?
The Laffer Curve and Limits to Class Warfare Tax Policy, Part II
19 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, econometerics, entrepreneurship, fiscal policy, human capital, income redistribution, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, poverty and inequality, Public Choice, public economics Tags: taxation and entrepreneurship, taxation and investment, taxation and labour supply
In Part I of this series back in 2014, we looked at some academic research from Canada showing that the revenue-maximizing tax rate on the richest taxpayers was 27.5 percent. A key insight from that research is that high-income taxpayers have considerable control over the timing, level, and composition of their income (just like in […]
The Laffer Curve and Limits to Class Warfare Tax Policy, Part II
Interview with Ellen McGrattan: Business Cycles and Intangible Capital
17 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in business cycles, Edward Prescott, entrepreneurship, financial economics, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, history of economic thought, human capital, labour economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, occupational choice, Robert E. Lucas
Tim Sablik of the Richmond Fed interviews “Ellen McGrattan: On measuring what businesses do, developing effective tax policy, and searching for answers beyond the lamppost” (Econ Focus: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, First/Second Quarter 2026). Here are a few of the comments that caught my eye: How did McGrattan become interested in business cycles? In…
Interview with Ellen McGrattan: Business Cycles and Intangible Capital
Why “Gini Coefficients” Are Meaningless
09 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in economics of education, entrepreneurship, financial economics, history of economic thought, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, poverty and inequality
I created the 8th Theorem of Government because it’s important to distinguish between people who want to help the poor and people who want to punish the rich. The former group has good motives while the latter group has ignoble motivations. Envy (common among the leftist intelligentsia) Public choice (common among leftist politicians) Zero-sum illiteracy […]
Why “Gini Coefficients” Are Meaningless
Claudia Goldin and the WNBA
30 Mar 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, discrimination, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, managerial economics, occupational choice, organisational economics, personnel economics, sports economics Tags: gender wage gap
After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three. One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league. When Goldin replied via email to Terri Carmichael Jackson,…
Claudia Goldin and the WNBA
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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