Peter Gordon's Blog

These days, everyone seemingly worries about global warming and rising sea levels. In true Bootleggers and Baptists fashion, one can line u...

Are we in Smartphone city yet? Mobile devices and their applications are everywhere. Growth projections are "off the charts." Even...

We suspect that many people are not well informed.  Why should they not believe that wages can be set by edict and that there are no conse...

Writing about stirring up redistribution ("The Truth About the 'One Percent'"), James Pierson   (today's WSJ)  notes: ...

I have often cited the Simon-Ehrlich wager in my teaching.  Putting "money where mouth is" is rare and worth noting when it happen...

Critics of Obamacare were wrong to see the recent CBO report on its job market effects as vindication of their "job killer" claim...

It's human nature that we treat each other best when we think we belong to the same family, band, tribe, etc. That seems to be the way o...

Russ Roberts interviews Erik Brynjolfsson this week and the conversation is as usual worthy.  Roberts has an amazing battin...

Evolution has equipped us with the capacity to cooperate (and survive) in small bands. But we are far less likely to cooperate beyond the ba...

The latest issue of Cityscape includes "Point of Contention: A Denser Future?" involving five essays. One way to frame the questi...

State of the Union speeches are not anything I enjoy.  Obama's performance last night was entirely predictable. Carefully crafted populi...

The Atlantic reports "How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood ...To understand how people look for movies, the video service created...

The Economist (Jan. 18) has another piece on accelerating technological change ( "Coming to an office near you ... The effect of today...

It has been 20 years since the LA area experienced the Northridge earthquake. There is a 20-year anniversary confab at UCLA to hash over wha...

Censorship attempts by any agency of government are usually dealt with by the courts.  The materials that cross the airwaves, however, are i...

Cities have been spreading our for all of recorded history. From the “walking city” (pre-1880) to the “streetcar city” (1880-1920) to the ...