Economics has recently lost another of the greats, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps, who passed away last week. Phelps was a macroeconomist, and among his many contributions he helped to formalise the concept of the natural rate of unemployment. Phelps won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for “his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy”.Surprisingly,…
Edmund Phelps, 1933-2026
Edmund Phelps, 1933-2026
28 May 2026 Leave a comment
in business cycles, history of economic thought, labour economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, unemployment
NZ First’s foray into transgender issues might be ethically dubious, but politically it could be a winner
27 May 2026 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of regulation, gender, law and economics, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, property rights Tags: 2024 presidential election, sex discrimination
One political advertisement stood out from the thousands that blitzed the US presidential campaign of 2024. It inflicted enormous damage on the Democratic Party’s flagbearer, Kamala Harris. The ad’s central tagline deployed just two sentences: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Former President Bill Clinton urged the Harris Campaign to come back […]
NZ First’s foray into transgender issues might be ethically dubious, but politically it could be a winner
Are Living Standards Higher in France or Mississippi?
25 May 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic growth, economic history, income redistribution, labour economics, macroeconomics, poverty and inequality, Public Choice Tags: France
Earlier this month, in Part V of my series on the U.S. vs. Europe (previous versions available here, here, here, and here), I shared a chart showing the OECD calculations of “Actual Individual Consumption.” The AIC numbers are designed to give people an apples-to-apples comparison of living standards. I’m re-sharing the chart today, and I’ve […]
Are Living Standards Higher in France or Mississippi?
Liberal Economists Score an Own Goal Against Bezos
25 May 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, fiscal policy, James Buchanan, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, Public Choice, public economics
Jeff Bezos tweeted: Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but…
Liberal Economists Score an Own Goal Against Bezos
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
The economics of unions
22 May 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, econometerics, economic history, industrial organisation, labour economics, survivor principle, unions
My best read of the evidence is that a union raises wages by around 7% for currently unionized employees. The wage gains from a redistribution of rents evenly across workers. Wage compression exists, but redistribution from worker to worker is only a small part. These are the current effects – unionizing more of the economy […]
The economics of unions
UCLA Medical School Accused of Racial Discrimination in Defiance of the Supreme Court
18 May 2026 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of education, politics - New Zealand Tags: affirmative action, racial discrimination
We previously discussed a disturbing account of how medical students at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University…
UCLA Medical School Accused of Racial Discrimination in Defiance of the Supreme Court
Reform’s trolling policy
17 May 2026 Leave a comment
in labour economics, labour supply, politics Tags: British politics, economics of immigration
The Guardian reports: A Reform government will not put any migrant detention facilities in any constituency with a Reform MP. Nor will we put them where Reform controls the council. And of the remaining areas, we will prioritise Green controlled parliamentary constituencies and Green controlled councils to locate the detention centres. Put simply, if you…
Reform’s trolling policy
Iceland’s Superb Private Retirement System
17 May 2026 Leave a comment
in fiscal policy, labour economics, macroeconomics, Public Choice, public economics Tags: Iceland
Over the years, I’ve written about the successful private retirement systems in jurisdictions such as Australia, Chile, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Netherlands, the Faroe Islands, Denmark, Israel, and Sweden. Today’s column will add to the collection because we’re going to look at Iceland’s remarkable system of personal retirement accounts. We’ll start with two charts. Here’s a […]
Iceland’s Superb Private Retirement System
Do Market Reforms Cause Growth?
08 May 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, development economics, econometerics, economic growth, economic history, history of economic thought, labour economics, macroeconomics, unemployment
Do market-oriented reforms cause economic growth? This paper revisits this question using a cross-country panel of reform episodes identified from various changes in well-known economic freedom and structural reform indices. We exploit the timing of reforms using distributed-lag and event-study frameworks that trace the dynamic response of per-capita GDP. We find little evidence of immediate…
Do Market Reforms Cause Growth?
The population bust
07 May 2026 Leave a comment
in economics of love and marriage, gender, labour economics, labour supply, law and economics, population economics Tags: ageing society, population bust
The Tragic Hysteria of Abortion
06 May 2026 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of crime, gender, health economics, law and economics Tags: abortion law reform
The radical pro-life position — “Abortion is as immoral as murdering a baby” — is easily refuted with a simple thought experiment. Namely: If you could either save one human baby from a fire, or a dozen human embryos, what are you morally obliged to do? 2,263 more words
The Tragic Hysteria of Abortion
African and Muslim roles in the African slave trade
01 May 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of crime, labour economics, labour supply, law and economics Tags: economics of slavery
The False Simplicity of Blaming “the West” Alone for the African Slave Trade On March 25, 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted a controversial resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the “gravest crime against humanity,” championed by Ghana on behalf of the African Union. The resolution, passed with 123 votes […]
African and Muslim roles in the African slave trade
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
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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