The Unbroken Window

“Excessive” inequality seems not to have been brought by Columbus, nor by colonial powers for several centuries, but largely after independence in the 19th century:
Compared with the rest of the world, inequality was not high in pre-conquest 1491, nor was it high in the post-conquest decades following 1492. Indeed, it was not even high in [...]

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Perhaps that is a dog-bites-man headline. But Rochester alumnus Lee Ohanian demonstrates that it wasn’t exactly his dedication to radical, anarchic, laissez-faire capitalism that did it:
I develop a theory of labor market failure for the Great Depression based on Hoover’s industrial labor program that provided industry with protection from unions in return for keeping nominal [...]

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Here are a few more tidbits from the life of Newton to illustrate just how good things were back in the good old days:

When Newton went to Trinity College, he had “enough” for his immediate needs: a chamber pot, a notebook of 140 blank pages (three and a hlaf by five and a half inches [...]

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Howard Brandston tells the emperor he has no clothes on:
“If energy conservation were to be the sole goal of energy policy, and efficacy were to be the sole technical consideration, then why CFLs? If we really want to save energy, we would advocate high-pressure sodium lamps—those large bulbs that produce bright orangish light in many [...]

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Folks, please pardon the changes in the site for now. I am working to get a new content management system installed to better integrate the blog with other media and economics learning materials to make the site more useful as a general economics learning tool. In the meantime, I seem to have “misplaced” lots of [...]

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You have a choice to play one of three games for money:
Choice A: there are 6 dice in a box with which you are to roll a six
Choice B: there are 12 dice in a box with whch you are to roll two sixes
Choice C: there are 18 dice in a box with whch you [...]

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Building high-speed rail will be like standing in the chilly vestibule of a mid-winter Amtrak train in Chicago and burning million-dollar bills to keep warm. But that’s what happens when you base your transportation policies on the slogan from a Kevin Costner movie rather than on real data.
That from the ever-worth reading Antiplanner.  How dare [...]

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That would be the public health insurance program in tiny Maine. Here is what it promised
In 2003, the state to great fanfare enacted its own version of universal health care … , it would cover all of Maine’s approximately 128,000 uninsured citizens. System-wide controls on hospital and physician costs would hold down insurance premiums. There [...]

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Shameless self-promotion alert. The Pope Center has published a dialogue several of us participated in via e-mail over the past few weeks. You can read me talking about the relationship between croaking frogs and undergraduate students.

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Just finished a 3 hour workshop during which several speakers used their laptops to present their materials. As they clicked around looking for files, their desktop wallpaper collages were there for all of us to see. One presenter had photos of her latest beach vacation, another had photos of her daughter riding horses, and her [...]

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