Peter Gordon's Blog

  n   Economists’ favorite question is still “How did we get so rich?” We learned how to coordinate production. We learned how to coordin...

Fly low over a major urban settlement and what do you see?   A mesh of an uncountable number of supply chains, including supply chains fo...

David C. Rose explains Why Culture Matters Most .  Small-group moral intuitions, small-group trust, are our heritage. But how to get larg...

There are many possible futures we hope are not in our future. Nuclear war, meteor colliding with Earth, infectious diseases that we cannot...

It's clear that most people like their cars. But it is also true that many people like to complain about cars and traffic. Some of the ...

Climate change is hard. It is a global phenomenon and any effort to “do something” must involve seemingly near-impossible global politica...

The U.S. economy is doing well -- and no one really knows why. Keynesian macro-economics (aggregate demand economics) is no help because ...

I enjoyed Tyler Cowen's BigBusiness: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero .  Indeed, I have not yet come across a negative review. Th...

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...