Judge Frank Easterbrook on antitrust law history
23 Sep 2020 Leave a comment
in Adam Smith, applied price theory, applied welfare economics, Austrian economics, comparative institutional analysis, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, economics of crime, economics of education, economics of information, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, law and economics, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking, Richard Posner, Ronald Coase, Ronald Coase, survivor principle Tags: competition and monopoly, competition law, creative destruction, offsetting behaviour, patents and copyright, The fatal conceit, The meaning of competition, unintended consequences
Why China’s control of rare earths matters | FT
23 Sep 2020 Leave a comment
in defence economics, development economics, economic history, energy economics, environmental economics, growth miracles, industrial organisation, international economics, politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: China
Is Beethoven about to be canceled, too?
22 Sep 2020 Leave a comment
There is no area of human endeavor, be it scholarship, art, science, or technology, that is immune from modern accusations of systemic racism. It’s almost funny how far the woke can cook up accusations, often without evidence, that an area is afflicted with bigotry and exclusion.
The latest victim appears to be Beethoven—not just the man and his work, but specifically the Fifth Symphony, which the authors below, Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, indict for exclusionism and, curiously, for “regularizing” classical music concerts so that concergoers have to be polite, well dressed, and adhere to the rule not to make noise. Their article is in Vox, which gets considerable circulation, so you can’t claim that this is just a pair of cranks sounding off.
Well, that may well be accurate, but these cranks have cred. Sloan is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Southern California, while
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Think your side is blameless in this Supreme Court fight? You’re wrong.
22 Sep 2020 Leave a comment
The pre-election event I most feared has happened. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died.
Her now-empty seat on the Supreme Court has the potential to polarize our deeply divided nation even further. The last Supreme Court confirmation hearings were so poisonous I nearly quit Facebook. I saw Christine Blasey-Ford called a “lying skank,” and Brett Kavanaugh called a rapist and a “rich white man throwing a fit because for the first time in his life, he might not get what he wants,” by people who’d never met them and knew absolutely nothing about them except which political team they were batting for. I watched Senators whose job was to discover the truth instead using their time to showboat and create soundbites for their bases.
How did something as fundamental to our system of government as seating Supreme Court justices become so contentious? Why are Republicans like Lindsey Graham willing to…
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Property Rights: Keynote – Richard Epstein
22 Sep 2020 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economic history, environmental economics, law and economics, property rights, public economics, Richard Epstein
The Fake Neighborhoods on Google Maps
22 Sep 2020 Leave a comment
in defence economics, International law, urban economics Tags: maps
Summing up @Greens @NZGreens @AOC @BernieSanders
22 Sep 2020 Leave a comment
in Marxist economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: regressive left, useful idiots
Leah Trueblood: ‘Following the Science:’ a Legal and Democratic Challenge
21 Sep 2020 Leave a comment
During a pandemic, it seems like a good idea for politicians to ‘follow the science.’ But what does this actually mean? The claim that the Government is ‘following the science’ is in many respects laudable, but is it also a convenient way to avoid or limit accountability? Due to a lack of transparency, it is unclear whether and to what extent substantive decisions are being made by scientists, or if this is just a politically helpful turn of phrase. A recent Institute for Government reportDecision Making in a Crisis: First Responses to the Coronavirus Pandemic potentially provides some insight into this question. The report says that when deciding whether to lockdown the country in March, the Government looked to science for ‘answers’ for what to do, rather than as part of a range of inputs into a decision-making process. Is the Government delegating decisions for which, under statute, it…
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