Peter Gordon's Blog

In her big-themed and important Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World , Deidre McCloskey covers a lot of groun...

Declining VMT per capita (left graphic below) is a relatively new thing. Is it economics? Demographics? Changing life styles? Unscrambling t...

The labels "Malthusian" and "neo-Malthusian" in modern usage obscure more than they convey. Robert Mayhew, in Malthus: T...

When you hear talk of "root causes," guard your wallet.  The current White House summit re terrorism is looking for its root cause...

Most people and most politicians agree that a higher minimum wage is a good thing.  But hell-bent, they throw common sense out the window.  ...

On Oct 30, 1969, the NY Times reported "School Integration Ordered by Supreme Court." That was not a long time ago. Some of us ce...

In the current New Yorker , James Surowiecki cites research that finds minimum wages hikes are really good for everyone.  This is counter-in...

China is, to say the least, fascinating. Coase and Wang are mainly optimistic. I would like to be too.  I teach there occasionally and find ...

Here is a famous headline from The Telegraph, 5 Nov, 2008: “The Queen asks why no one saw the credit crunch coming … During a briefing by a...

Twenty-five years ago, Milton Friedman suggested that the U.S.was 45% socialist.  I prefer the label "crony capitalist" and the p...

I had previously cited the work of David Theroux.  Here , David links the thought of C.S. Lewis to modern conceptions of liberty and the int...

Tyler Cowen cites The Horse in the City which I reviewed a while back.  This history is interesting for many reasons. 1. Most people fea...

Robin Hanson asks "Why not sell cities?"   You buy and own the city; you become the residual claimant (landlord) and can internali...

What do we know? Our economic data are not very good -- and probably getting worse as more of the economy creates hard-to-measure consumer s...

Bloodthirsty primitives around the world have a way of hogging the news. But many of you have seen this YouTube and it does help. Watch it ...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA,"Obamacare") is apparently not popular with many Americans. But stay tuned; not all of the law has ki...

Richard Florida wrote about income inequality, comparing the various states in yesterday's NY Times . There is apparently quite a lot o...

Two things usually occur in late December. Economists make economic forecasts for the coming year -- and others remind them how terrible the...

Doomsday forecasts fail because they fail to consider that (non-scarce) human ingenuity, incited by credible property rights, will doom the ...

Most American school kids learn about the system of checks and balances written into the U.S. Constitution. At that level, it is very attrac...