Peter Gordon's Blog

All government agencies "need" more money.  This recent report by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's new GM not...

You can never know enough history. I have lived most of my life in Los Angeles and most of my professional life has been at USC. But I still...

GDP (in some form such as per capita, real per capita, real per capita change, etc.) is the widely used proxy for an area's well-offness...

What do we know about cities? To simplify shamelessly, 1. The canonical model of urban economics predicts that cities will spread out as c...

I recently did some teaching in China. What did my students hear from me?  Among other things, there is Good Capitalism and Bad Capitalism ...

Neil Irwin (at Economix, July 11) tell us the latest from Uber and Lyft (still unable to link from you-know-where but source is easy to find...

Joseph Epstein wrote a moving tribute to his friend Edward Shils "My Friend Edward" (in his Narcissus Leaves the Pool ; unable to ...

It's a simple but profound point made by Hayek in The Fatal Conceit : there are two ways to get to non-zerosumness, markets and love; do...

I have been resisting any impulse to pick up and get into my copy of Thomas Piketty's Capital .  One reason is that it has been reviewed...

For all we know, most people at some time think about their legacy. Will I be remembered? By whom? For how long? For what?  This thinking ha...

Timothy Taylor rightly takes on stagnationist Larry Summers. Summers points to a slow U.S. economy and suggests more public sector infrastr...

In 2012, The Freeman featured discussions of Seasteading . "What would it take to get you to move to a seastead?" I liked this re...

Tyler Cowen points us to a study which claims that LA is "on the cusp" of becoming a major walkable city.  Two points should be ...

I decided to link to Megan McArdle's discussion of the "lost" Lois Lerner emails (H/T Craig Newamark) because: 1. The epis...

Suggesting the end of history or progress or innovation or growth or anything is a huge stretch. But stagnation theses in economics are no...

The political Left feasts on self-anointed moral superiority. "Inequality" is on the lips of pundits and politicians all over the ...

We can date "modern" economics to the work of Adam Smith and note that for most of its time "the firm" was treated as a ...

Here are two views from the urban economics literature that might be seen as dueling views. “ … a central paradox of our times is that...

Here is Nate Baum-Snow discussing why cities will become more dense. Here are data indicating more cell phones than people in the world --...

I still get various requests from journal editors to referee papers on "sprawl." Readers of this blog know that I am not fon...