Peter Gordon's Blog

There is always more than one theory. My explanation of Hawaii's gasoline price controls, yesterday, was the standard political grandsta...

In 1947, Humphrey Michell published "The Edict of Diocletian" in the Canadian Journal of Economics (no link to the article found)....

This morning's WSJ coverage of the Jackson Hole monetary policy confab cites Prinecton's Ricardo Reis and Alan Blinder, praising Al...

It's all so obvious -- once someone has done it. Networks can be fitted to many things, including webs of ideas and legal opinions. The ...

You try to run a serious blog and this stuff comes along. And just when I had thought that public libraries were going to have trouble kee...

Now that the California redistricting initiative (Proposition 77, which would take that authority from the politicians) is back on the Fall ...

"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" This is the epithet that is especially irksome to economists, who are supposed ...

Columnist Max Boot recently wrote, "Hamastan? Gaza pullout worth the risk ...For almost 40 years, the conceit has been growing around ...

The Census Bureau has just released Examining American Household Composition: 1990 and 2000 . The report makes interesting reading, altho...

Cold weather cities and regions in the U.S. have been relatively uncompetitive for some years. In "Smart Growth: Education, skilled w...

Many Greens celebrate high oil prices, hoping that they will cause us to come to our senses. But the front page of today's LA Times rep...

Yesterday's WSJ included "Greenhouse Passes ... To Cut Pollution, Dutch Pay a Dump In Brazil to Clean Up ... Kyoto Treaty Creates ...

Papers that report on tests of economic growth hypotheses across large international cross-sections keep cropping up. Ilan Alon and Gregory ...

In yesterday's NY Times , David Brooks wrote on The Virtues Of Virtue , "According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of...

I am reading Fred Siegel's delightful The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life . Siegel sets the stage...

Governments can be predators and they can be incompetent. They are often both. Going to war unleashes multiple horrors, including the expans...

Some weeks ago, I posted my skepticism re a NY Times columnist's gullible acceptance of a Portland claim that they had found a way to r...

The financial pages of major newspapers usually have plenty of fare to feed, both, bullish as well as bearish moods. What to make of the WSJ...

The link between property rights and economic development has been recognized for many years, elaborated by Adam Smith, yet stranegly ignore...

The 2002 Census of Governments reports that there were 87,525 local governments in the U.S., of which almost 36,000 were cities or townships...