Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in Central Planning, Development, Entrepreneurs, Extended Order, growth, Innovation, Macroeconomics, Market Failures on May 27th, 2016
In revisiting my class discussions on the economics of public goods, I came across a paper from the OECD that incredibly I had never been aware of. One of the major results in the paper is shocking. Now the sample size, as with all cross-country analyses, is small, and there are the usual caveats about […]
Posted in growth, Macroeconomics on May 31st, 2013
Tyler Cowen uses this as evidence for his view that “We are not as wealthy as we thought we were” (which I often agree with): From Ylan Q. Mui at The Washington Post: American households have rebuilt less than half of the wealth lost during the recession, according to a new analysis from the Federal […]
Posted in growth on Jul 16th, 2012
As a "professional" economist it is natural that I would seem to support efforts by the government to collect data. These function very much like employment subsidies for me. Do I think that the collection of data is subject to "public goods" problems? In some respects yes – not that data cannot be excluded from […]
Posted in Extended Order, growth, Institutions on Nov 28th, 2011
Today we begin a periodic series that will attempt to capture, via the numbers, exactly what has happened to the size and scope of government since the Great Society. People of all stripes have lovely narratives about “climates” of regulation or deregulation, point to increases or decreases in tax rates, point to the composition of […]
Posted in growth, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Oct 25th, 2011
Beginning in 1848 a new theory of economic growth began to proliferate. The massive extension of the division of labor and exchange, capital accumulation, and improvement of institutions that Hume, Smith, Ricardo and others identified as being key ingredients to economic growth, it seems, were only made possible because of an increase in the exploitive […]
Mississippi. Did you know that the PPP adjusted output per person in Mississippi, the “poorest” state in the United States, would rank it just about equal to the output per person in France? And similarly, Mississippi is richer than places like Italy and Spain. And you can even visit Mississippi for a fraction of the […]
Posted in growth, Institutions on May 15th, 2008
One of my best former students asked me recently, “What one US policy change would have the biggest impact for improving the US economy? Same question regarding the world.” I am usually loathe to answer these sorts of questions, because I don’t want anyone to mistake an answer for something that would be easy to […]