Peter Gordon's Blog

It's election season and we see sides of human nature that are not pretty. Seeking votes, candidates make promises they cannot keep. Vo...

The year-end issue of The Economist includes a nice essay on planning. “Beware of the Borg” (title in print edition). Everyone plans; p...

Where to start? We have too much crony capitalism. Many of our young people graduate unprepared for productive work. Productivity gaps tran...

In the current the New Yorker , Adam Gopnik writes " We Built This City : What we can learn from a long-reviled master of 'urban r...

We know that information is crucial, complex and dispersed. This is why there are ubiquitous information markets. We are all on a mission t...

Progress is my favorite idea. Steven Pinker  has (and many others have) documented how much better off we are than those who preceded us. I...

The New Yorker (Sep 2, 2019) reviews yet more recent work on increasing inequality ( "Widening Gyre" ).   There are many discu...

The very long U.S. election season is here.   What to keep on mind? Two things strike me as fundamental. 1. Knowledge is complex and ...

  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 ...