Land supply is everything to housing affordability
17 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, law and economics, libertarianism, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, property rights, public economics, urban economics Tags: housing affordability, land supply, zoning
Lucas: New Keynesian economics doesn’t seem to make contact with the questions that got us interested in macroeconomics in the first place.
17 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
WaPo review indulges in myth, claims Bernstein’s ‘work brought down a president’
17 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
You’d think editors at the Washington Postmight have turned to statements by its Watergate-era principals before allowing a mythical claim about the scandal to appear in a book review that was published today.
The claim appears in a predictably favorable critique of Carl Bernstein’s ChasingHistory, a memoir about his early days in journalism.
The book, the Post’s review notes, “doesn’t mention Watergate. The occasional references to [President] Richard Nixon have nothing to do with the scandal that Bernstein” reported on with Bob Woodward for the Post in the early 1970s.
“Bernstein has no interest in retelling an already well-known tale,” the review assures us. “Instead of the staccato just-the-facts brag you might expect from an investigative reporter whosework brought down a president, ‘Chasing History’ is a lovingly detailed memoir composed in a humble register.”
Media Myth Alert is only faintly interested in a memoir by
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Life in Alsace Lorraine
17 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
in defence economics, economic history, International law, war and peace Tags: France, Germany
Your work on the US found that productivity shocks explain most of the cyclical fluctuations the economy has experienced. Does this finding have any bearing on the nature of public policy?
17 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
in business cycles, economic history, economics of regulation, Edward Prescott, growth miracles, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, monetary economics, public economics
The Ongoing Horror of Cuban Socialism
17 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
Back in 2014, I compared the long-run economic performance of Cuba and Hong Kong.
Both jurisdictions were roughly equal about 60 years ago. But the data show a dramatic performance gap ever since the communists took power in Cuba,
with Hong Kong (which was very pro-market back then) enjoying much bigger increases in prosperity.
Sadly, not much has changed in Cuba since I wrote that column.
The communist dictatorship is still there, and the economy is still socialist (notwithstanding even Castro admitting its failure).
And this means ongoing misery for ordinary people.
Here are some excerpts from a story published by Agence France-Presse.
Cubans are no strangers to queuing for everything from bread to toothpaste, often standing for hours under a blazing sun with no access to a toilet or drinking water, and always with the fear of leaving empty-handed. It is a daily ordeal Cubans have endured…
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Empirical Austrian Economics?
17 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
David Friedman recently got into an online debate with Walter Block that could be seen as a boxing match between “Austrian economics” and the “Chicago School of Economics”. In the wake of this debate, Friedman assembled his thoughts in this piece which is supposed (if I understand properly) to be published as a chapter in an edited volume. Upon reading this piece, I thought it worthy of providing my thoughts in part because I see myself as being both a member of both schools of thought and in part because I specialize in economic history. And here is the claim I want to make: I don’t see any meaningful difference between both and I don’t understand why there are perpetual attempts to create a distinction.
But before that, let’s do a simple summary of the two views according to Friedman (which is the first part of the essay). The “Chicago”…
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Keep the dream alive
17 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
in discrimination, Marxist economics Tags: political correctness, regressive left, virtue signalling
What about the recession of 1980-81?
16 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
in business cycles, Edward Prescott, financial economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics
Risible Renewables: Weather-Dependent Wind Power – Never There When You Need It Most
16 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
Pin your energy needs on the weather, and prepare for disappointment, over and over and over again.
South Australians know it, Germans know it, Texans and Californians know it, all too well.
In the latter part of 2021, as the Big Calm descended across Western Europe, Brits learned all about it, too. Quietly firing up once-mothballed, but ever-reliable, coal-fired power plants and feverishly importing nuclear power from France.
All up, the ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun-powered future has amounted to little more than a well-orchestrated high farce.
On that score, Paul Homewood takes a look at what passes for research into the likelihood of total wind power output collapses in Britain.
While Paul reckons that no one is suggesting the wind will stop blowing completely around the postage stamp of territory that is the UK, we’ll set out a couple from the archives to prove that…
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16 Jan 2022 Leave a comment
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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