Peter Gordon's Blog

In a few words, Mike Munger sums up the new world of the sharing economy (H/T Café Hayek): "Portable platforms (mostly smartphones)...

Here David Warsh speculates on what the new chapter of the Amazon-Walmart rivalry means. Is it good for cities? Is it good for suburbs? Bot...

No $20 bills on sidewalks is pretty clear. Also clear is the logic of the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH):  in the race for profit, new i...

With all the hand wringing over the Trump withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, it is refreshing and useful to get this short (just ove...

Arnold Kling's The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across Political Divides may be the best ratio of good ideas to pages of text I...

In Today's NY Times , Robert Shiller writes "How Tales of  'Flippers' Led to a Housing Bubble ... Conventional data aside,...

The WSJ includes an interesting piece about urban land use, "A Farm Grow in the City: Startups are leading the way to a future in whic...

Minimally politicized health care would be best. But it is an ideal that we are drifting ever further away from.  What would minimally polit...

The New Yorker 's Adam Davidson writes about the "Sweet Smell of Success" , in this case the cluster of firms involving cosmet...

It is a cliche to say that where transacting does not occur there will be conflict -- even violence. Everyone has now seen the United Airlin...

The fundamental insight of economics is that choices based on market prices give us the best allocations of scarce resources.  It follows th...

The End of History was nice while it lasted. There are only cycles (a truism) but we never know the their timing (another truism). Mercanti...

The usually sharp Ross Douthat of the NY Times has recently been writing about "implausible" or "ridiculous" (his words...

Perhaps the most insightful work on political economy is Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Staying clear of anarchy, we are ...

Whenever someone evokes "the good old days," I answer with two words: "medical science." The ailments that we have exper...

Conor Dougherty writes abut NYC street traffic in today's NY Times . "Self-Driving Cars Can't Cure Traffic but Economics Can....

Here is the L.A. Times noting that LA Metro ridership is still falling -- even though billions have been (mis)spent on extra capacity over...

Good politics makes bad economics and vice versa. The Trump administration's ideas on trade prove it. In today's WSJ , we see that ...

Dan Klein has a forthcoming paper ( Independent Review ) on "The Joys of Yiddish and Economics." Dan looks at the Leo Rosten clas...

Here is Eric Hanushek, arguably the most astute scholar on U.S. lower school performance (and what can be done about it), commenting on fla...