Peter Gordon's Blog

In the time of pandemic, changes that had been underway speed up. People adapt and change a little faster, technology adapts and changes fa...

Economists tell students and others that there are "needs" and "wants". And the distinction is subjective and personal ...

Palisades Park in Santa Monica has long been my favorite weekend escape. Many others feel the same way. It is a pleasant place for walks...

   -- Black swans can happen anytime, anywhere. 2 --  Initial responses are inevitably confused. But trial-and-error learning happ...

The 10 richest men of all time Mansa Musa   (1280-1337, king of the Mali empire) wealth indescribable Augustus Caesar   (63 BC-14 AD, R...

I never took the Stanford Marshmallow test but presume that I am patient.  The current issue of The Economist notes that transportation i...

Watching last night's State of the Union was not easy. With cameras on and the nation watching, preening and pandering were on full dis...

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 ...