Peter Gordon's Blog

Robert Shiller writes “Modern Monetary Theory Makes Sense, to a Point” (MMT) in today’s NYT .   What is MMT?   It comes out of the Bern...

People who talk about macroeconomics are captivated by the Philips curve trade-off between unemployment and inflation.  The thinking has be...

There are probably good medical definitions of overweight and underweight. There are many other serious examples. But many other casually u...

Socialism and Capitalism are fraught labels that many people will define in their own convenient way. Crony capitalism is surely the wrong ...

In recent weeks, California’s new governor canceled (actually scaled back) California’s high-speed rail (previous post), Airbus canceled ...

Pharaohs, popes and politicians like(d) mega-projects. Peter Hall has documented Great PlanningDisasters. Bent Flyvjberg and his collea...

"Fatal conceit" is precious.  How much wisdom can be crammed into a two-word phrase! It is amazing (but not surprising) that t...

We know that many of the geniuses of fin de siècle Vienna met in the café’s of that city’s first district to produce great conversation ...

Climate change, to the extent that it is human-caused is a global commons. The Prisoners' Dilemma indicates the futility of individual ...

The problem of congested roads is explained by the absence pricing. For some strange reason, most analysts call this a "market failure...

Socialists avoid confronting socialism's failures (and tragedies) by claiming that the "real" socialism has not yet been trie...

Cognitive dissonance  (holding two opposing ideas at the same time) is supposed to be stressful. Perhaps and perhaps not. "Every vot...

Here is Russ Roberts writing about lonely men with guns. Do read the whole essay. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that almost all of th...

Here is today's NY Times piece on the two new economics Nobelists. In efforts to make their work accessible to the public, much has be...

Here is Don Boudreaux referring to Leland Yeager's remarks to the effect that Econ 1 (or Econ 101) is all you really need. The uncounta...

I greatly enjoyed Cass Sunstein's The Cost-Benefit Revolution . I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about project and pol...

What do we know? (1) Immigration expands the talent pool, with potential economic as well as cultural benefits, (2) the accident of birth is...

When in casual conversation someone mentions "planned obsolescence" it's time to end the discussion.  This was once a favorite...

Economics is about human action. It points us away from discussions of inanimate objects and, instead, towards the actors, the real people, ...

Austan Goolsbee worries that sellers have found ways to "trap" us. Branding is, of course, the name of the game. As sellers, we w...