Peter Gordon's Blog

California's high-speed rail has nothing to go for it except the typical alliances of baptists and bootleggers  that pretty much define ...

You could call cooperation and competition the ying and the yang of economics. Donald Trump and other protectionists only see competition wh...

The post-recession reckoning among economists (and others) is in full swing and will go on. Among my favorites is the very readable Behind t...

"If you build it, they will come" is one of the sillier ideas around. It ignores demand.  The Economist comments on how this idea...

One wishes that good economics makes good politics but every time politicians reach for protectionist policies, it becomes clear that this i...

The wise Tom Sowell supposedly (I cannot find the link) summed up what we need to think about when we dream up policy proposals with the sim...

My favorite read of 2018 is Niall Ferguson’s The Tower and the Square: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook . Ferguson ...

Over at Marginal Revolution , Alex Tabarrok notes that today's NY Times just misses the opportunity for another "teaching moment...

Tyler Cowen asks "Why don't cities grow without limit." He comments on (and links to) a Paul Krugman discussion of the same t...

Today's NY Times includes " The Megacity, Untethered ... Urban giants are going global, but losing their connections with smaller...

The trend to bigger government and bigger politics is clear. With that we get ever more discussions of inequality. Current tax reform discus...

Randal O'Toole writes "It's the Last Stop on the Light-Rail Gravy Train ... Mayors want new lines that won't be ready for ...

Don Boudreaux has been (almost daily) punching away at protection and the crony capitalism involved.  Here is a sample. Almost daily we h...

What is charisma?  You know it when you see it.  Reports  cited in the WSJ go a bit further. Various studies are cited.  Here are the resul...

Tyler Cowen noted that Cities and Suburbs Are Becoming Pretty Similar .  Of course.  A city-suburb dichotomy is much too simple. Nevertheles...

Russ Roberts interviewed Philip Auerswald on populism . Rapid change divides the population; some thrive while others are left behind and be...

Just a few days ago I posted this: When natural disasters occur, supply and demand is a lifesaver. It is the way to reallocate resources t...

Amazon wants a second headquarters . But where? Near or far? Reasons for nearby expansion involve scale economies but (as always) there can ...

In Adam Smith's day, it was moral philosophy.  But for many years, that has been replaced with what Deirdre McClosky calls Max U (or Sam...

The Economist includes a nice summary of Pigouvian taxes (or subsidies) as a straightforward remedy to the problem of uncompensated extern...