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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