Ezra Klein, a journalist who writes about economic policy, offers a list of common mistakes made by economists. Ezra’s list is not bad, but I can’t help but feel that turnabout is fair play. If economic journalists can tell economists that they’re doing it wrong, it seems only fitting that economists should be allowed to [...]
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed last week that I have an app in the new Mac App Store. It’s called Gmail Dock, you can find more info about it here and here, and you can buy it here. I am an economist, not a programmer, so what am I doing [...]
Tags: App Store, Apple, Coase, economics, Gmail Dock, Mac App Store, Nature of the Firm, transaction costs
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On the technology sites I frequent, TechCrunch and Hacker News, there has been an uproar over Google’s joint proposal with Verizon, in which traditional Internet service providers would be subject to net neutrality regulation and wireless providers would not. I think the outrage over Google’s alleged betrayal of Internet users is ill founded. Most of [...]
Tags: economics, Google, industrial organization, Internet, net neutrality, Rothbard, Varian, Verizon
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When human and physical capital accumulate, output grows. Most people would agree with this statement, but what does it mean? This depends on the meaning of the words capital and output. I don’t offer a precise definition, but both ideas seem to have something to do with useful configurations of matter and information. That is, [...]
Tags: biology, consciousness, economics, entropy, entropy ethics, Hayek, order, physics, thermodynamics
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The very clever Josh Knox points me to Steve Jobs’s open letter about Flash. Following up on my last post on double marginalization, he wonders if Apple’s distaste for Flash can be explained in those terms. Josh is absolutely correct. The money sentence in Jobs’s letter is this: Though the operating system for the iPhone, [...]
Tags: Adobe, Apple, double marginalization, economics, Flash, Jobs, Knox, open standards
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A lot of pixels have been spilled in the last week about how Facebook has seized control of the Internet with their new API initiatives. This is supposedly troubling: unlike Google, Facebook might be evil, the hand-wringers say. But even if Facebook is able to monopolize a large segment of our time on the Internet, [...]
Tags: economics, Facebook, Google, monopoly, natural monopoly, network effects
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Welcome to the third installment in our series of discussions of the Most Insightful Articles in economics. Today we are discussing Ken Arrows’s 1950 article A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare. If you’re interested in politics, you may have done the following thought experiment. Suppose there are three voters—1, 2, and 3—and three [...]
Tags: Arrow, Coase, Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare, economics, impossibility theorem, Levine, Most Insightful Articles, Plott, Problem of Social Cost
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Welcome to the second installment in our series of discussions of the Most Insightful Articles in economics. This post is going up a little later than I had planned, but hopefully you have stuck around. Today we are discussing Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 article The Use of Knowledge in Society. Whereas Coase invites us to consider [...]
Tags: Arrow, Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare, economics, Hayek, local knowledge, Most Insightful Articles, price system, Use of Knowledge in Society
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Welcome to the first installment of our series of discussions of the Most Insightful Articles in economics. Today we are discussing Ronald Coase’s 1937 article The Nature of the Firm. Ronald Coase wrote only a handful of academic journal articles—nearly every one is a blockbuster. He won the Nobel Prize in 1991 “for his discovery [...]
Tags: Coase, economics, Hayek, Most Insightful Articles, Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Use of Knowledge in Society
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Which economics articles teach us the most about how to think about the world? Over the next few weeks, I plan to write about the articles that I think belong in this group. I am hoping that some readers will want to follow along and discuss the articles in the comments. Here is what I [...]
Tags: Coase, economics, Most Insightful Articles, Nature of the Firm
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