Peter Gordon's Blog

The climate news most likely to make it into the popular discourse tends to be one-sided. Matt Ridley ("An Ice-Free Arctic Ocean Has H...

The revised second-quarter GDP numbers are here -- and again dismal. What to do? "Janet Yellen is calling for investment in public infr...

There are few if any unmixed blessings. Almost everyone likes and uses the internet. But there are obvious downsides. Ross Douthat takes up ...

There are many pithy ways economists use to make important points ("no free lunch", "compared to what?" etc.). Among the...

Ironies make us think. And there are plenty of them. We know that in U.S. politics, "liberal" is now the opposite of its original ...

Here is the Malcolm Gladwell podcast re Toyota's "sudden acceleration" problem. Listen to all of Episode 8. Here is Gladwell...

The mantra used to be that the antidote for bad cost-benefit studies is good (properly done) cost-benefit studies. But Bob Higgs remains sk...

Here is the always wise Matt Ridley talking about experts and their forecasting skills (lack of). He cites the Philip Tetlock project. We...

First, I cannot imagine more enjoyable economic history than by Deirdre McCloskey. I just finished Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capita...

This week's NY Times coverage of Los Angeles ( "The Capital of Car Culture Warms to Mass Transit" ) was 100% wrong. Wendell C...

Wendell Cox reports that the latest data show that there are "Shorter commutes in American Suburbs and Exurbs" . He means in terms...

I often used the Paul Heyne (now with Boettke and Prychitko) textbook for its many appealing features, one of which is end-of-chapter quest...

Is it "death of distance" or is it agglomeration? It is both. False choices mislead. We keep getting clusters of complementary act...

Baumol's cost disease famously calls attention to the fact that when there are reasons to expect steady productivity divergence between...

"Studies show" that raising the minimum wage has no (or very few) unemployment consequences. This is an approximate version of th...

Deng Xiaoping was probably China’s greatest 20 th century leader. He turned a very large and very poor country into a very large count...

I think it was Arnold Kling (I cannot find the post right now) who noted that one can only have any two of the following three: privacy, sec...

We know about confirmation bias. It is all too easy (even fun) to look for evidence that confirms our priors. Psychologists (and others) can...

I had heard about "tiny homes" but we are seeing more discussions, suggesting that there is a serious (still tiny)audience. The WS...

There used to be political economy. Then they split into political science and economic science (official title of the Nobel in economics)....