~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (27)

These topics seem underexplored to me: Montesquieu Economics in the Talmud Rise of econometrics in the 19th century The Irish economists, including Cairnes and Longfield The last 50 years of economics are in general very poorly covered Works in any foreign language you might read Chinese economic thought Economic thought in India The funding of […] The post History of economic thought paper ideas...

An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular: Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral […] The post Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT* appeared first...

At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t […] The post The $20 bill gets picked up,...

It’s long been argued that the means of production influence social, cultural and psychological processes. Rice farming, for example, requires complex irrigation systems under communal management and intense, coordinated labor. Thus, it has been argued that successful rice farming communities tend to develop people with collectivist orientations, and cultural ways of thinking that emphasize group […] The post Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  You can tell he knows what an interview is!  At the same time, he understands this differs from many of his other venues and he responds with flying colors.  Here is the episode summary: Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as […] The post My Conversation with Fareed Zakaria appeared...

Open borders hasn’t been getting a lot of good press recently but next week Bulgaria and Romania will join the Schengen Area for air and sea travel (road travel will likely follow). No more passports or visa necessary! The Schengen Area is a remarkable achievement for a part of the world once riven by violence […] The post Opening Borders appeared first on Marginal...

I am setting aside most of the cultural and “macro” issues, and just considering policy, in my latest Bloomberg column.  Excerpt: Consider agriculture. If you fly over Hispaniola, you can see a notable difference between the Haitian and Dominican sides of the border. The Dominican side has plenty of trees, whereas the Haitian side is denuded. Much […] The post Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic appeared...

Here is an outline of part of my lecture.  I presented “free trade” (NB: it wasn’t totally free), the classical gold standard, and some modicum of free immigration (not everywhere) as three successful and mostly stable pillars of 19th century classical liberal achievement.  Of course that was for limited parts of Western Europe and North […] The post Some triumphs of 19th century liberalism...

1760-1830, typically considered peak of Industrial Revolution Malthus, first decade of the 19th century Ricardo’s Principles, 1817 Theory of rent Theory of comparative advantage The machinery question Ricardo, The High Price of Bullion, 1810 Bullionist debates, Napoleonic wars, Ricardo and Malthus and Thornton Ricardian equivalence, thinking in terms of systems and models The Ricardians: James […] The post 19th century British economic thought (another...

Doug of course is one of the top trade economists.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript, from the same wonderful Mercatus team that brings you CWT.  Here is one excerpt: RAJAGOPALAN: I have a different question on Adam Smith. We’re all taught Adam Smith’s division of labor, specialization, economies of scale, the cliff notes […] The post Shruti Rajagopalan interviews Doug Irwin appeared...

T-Mobile’s takeover of Sprint was controversial among analysts. “If this merger is not anticompetitive,” Eleanor Fox, a trade regulation and antitrust law professor at New York University, told reporters in 2020, “it is hard to know what is.” Yale economist and antitrust scholar Fiona Scott Morton delivered her verdict on the deal in a co-authored 2021 article: “The era […] The post Revisiting the T-Mobile-Sprint Merger appeared first...

Early French moralists, some of them Jansenists: Pierre Nicole, La Rochefoucauld, etc. Invisible hand, idea of “mechanism” Pascal, Pensées, 1669, probability and expected value 17th century mercantilism, Louis XIV, Colbert 18th century, Galiani (Italian), French debates on bread and bread prices 1748, Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, analysis of commerce Diderot, Voltaire, Encyclopedia, rationalism Beccaria […] The post Early French economics, my lecture notes...

1650s, wars with England, invasions, Cromwell repels the Scots 1690s – Darien Scheme in Panama, Scots more generally grow interested in empire 1707 – Union with England Scotland keeps its Presbyterian church and laws Scotland never settled by Rome, for a long time closer to France Post Glorious Revolution, many Scots still loyal to the […] The post My notes/outline on the rise of...

Science seems like a public good; in theory, ideas are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. But the closer we look at how ideas actually spread and are used in the world, the less they seem like public goods. As I am fond of pointing out, Thomas Keller wrote a literal recipe book for the dishes he served […] The post Is Science a Public Good? appeared...

Here is the link, I am reviewing a bad book on the Clinton administration (A Fabulous Failure, by Lichtenstein and Stern).  Here is one excerpt: Clinton-era welfare reform is another area where many commentators go astray, and Lichtenstein and Stein are no exception. The Clinton pronouncement “I have a plan to end welfare as we […] The post My TLS essay on the Clinton...

Greg Clark may well be the most important social scientist of the 21st century. His use of historical data informed by evolutionary theory and genetics is a unique contribution to social science with important and challenging results. Clark’s latest paper (with Neil Cummins) makes a simple but striking point. If the primary systematic determinant of […] The post Matriline versus Patriline: Social Mobility in...

That is my podcast with Cardiff Garcia, now on-line and with transcript too.  Cardiff proposed a novel approach: Who is the Magic Johnson of economics? Who was the Adam Smith of basketball? On this fun and oddball episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff speaks with Tyler Cowen, economist and author of GOAT: Who is the […] The post If econs could hoop — The...

The Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University will be hosting another Summer Institute on the History of Economics from June 3-12, 2024. The program is designed for students in graduate programs in economics, though students in graduate school in other fields as well as newly minted PhDs will also be considered. […] The post Duke History of Economic Thought Summer...

The country was not quite as rich in the early days as it is sometimes made out to be: Argentina’s performance on this measure is frequently exaggerated.  In 1929, for example, Argentina’s per capita income was less than half of the average of other temperate agrarian societies (such as Canada and Australia) and of European […] The post Argentina fact of the day appeared...

But a hundred years ago, birds were seen as the best remedy for the weeds and insect pests that threatened the country’s food supply and cost farmers hundreds of millions of dollars every year. And in order to identify the precise impact that birds had on agriculture, a field called economic ornithology was born. According […] The post Economic ornithology appeared first on Marginal...

“The counterfeiter probably didn’t realize that that coin didn’t exist,” Dr. Ortega said. He said that an influx of low-value coinage would have been welcomed in Peru at the dawn of the 20th century. The country’s economy was reeling from the recent War of the Pacific, and the government was focusing on printing larger-denomination paper […] The post The efficiency of counterfeiting in 19th...

History of Economic Thought syllabus The honor code applies to this class. Accommodations will be made for disabilities in accord with the policies of George Mason University. Your grade is 2/3 based on your paper, 1/3 based on a final exam. You are required to submit short progress reports on your paper on a regular […] The post My history of economic thought reading...

He is starting a new podcast and I am perhaps the first episode?  There is video and text and audio.  Here is an excerpt: Lindsey: Did they recognize early on that you were different and that they had a job to do to push you, or no? Cowen: Well, my father thought I was weird, so he […] The post My podcast with Brink Lindsey appeared...

But unlike a full-grown T. rex, which would be about the size of a city bus, this dinosaur was more like the size of a pickup truck. The specimen, which is now listed for sale for $20 million at an art gallery in London, raises a question that has come to obsess paleontologists: Is it simply a […] The post The economics of dinosaur brand names...