The Unbroken Window

I assume some will find this in bad taste in light of last week’s tragedies in Boston. But just in case anyone was paying attention, we’re closing in on a dozen years since the WTC was destroyed and it’s rebuild is still not complete yet, so I find it hard to read notes that New [...]

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I suppose one downside to having a family is that it gives you more to worry about when it comes to these matters. Of course, it gives you a bigger reason to give a damn too. Here, via Coyote via Popehat, is a lesson my kids (not children) will learn from me and their mother: [...]

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Did you ever spend gargantuan amounts of time obsessing about a particular decision or purchase? Which graduate school should you attend? What kind of car should you buy? Or spending weeks and weeks and weeks waiting for the perfect deal, or for a good-used version of some product that you want to come up for [...]

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Perhaps the most sophisticated argument that markets “fail” is that two parties to a transaction are rarely privy to the same information (you can write down a problem where total ignorance is better than partial ignorance for market outcomes). In the presence of information asymmetries you would expect certain parties to be driven from the [...]

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How often do you encounter organizations that seem to have “no agenda” or claim to be “non-partisan.” If ever there was a time to do some mental substitution, this would be it. I worked for a “non-partisan economic research foundation” once. They were gold bugs and some strange blend of Marxist sympathising libertarians. I had [...]

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“The Year Was 2012, and Everyone Was Finally Equal” 11 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Casey Martin, a player of considerable talent who was suffering from a terrible degenerative leg disorder, against the PGA TOUR (these are other players by the way, not some evil corporation) in his request to [...]

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(1) One of the most influential and long-lasting Supreme Court Decisions was the Wickard v. Filburn decision in 1942 which basically said that anything is interstate commerce. In this case, a farmer in Ohio decided to grow extra wheat for himself, wheat that was never going to leave his farm and be consumed entirely by his family/farm [...]

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Ezra Klein’s blog is typically very good. But this piece is terrible, pardon my French. It basically shows that people who defaulted on their mortgages today are not quickly getting new mortgages and buying houses, and among the reasons are that they don’t have money for a down payment. The author claims this is not [...]

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It is probably a given that people are averse to the idea that bargaining power between two parties be very far from equal. Think about how people feel about big box employers in their relationships with their “lowly” employees. But would there be much, if any, widespread aversion if the bargaining power tables were turned? [...]

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Economists have long puzzled about why even some currently unemployed workers could not simply reduce their wage requirements by a substantial amount and encourage firms to hire them. There is a nice literature on this which includes explanations such as unmeasured productivity, the signaling implied by such an offer, the matching difficulty between potential workers [...]

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