Topic: Economic Theory

Correlation Is Not Enough

“The ‘look here, too’ method provides a valuable check on statistical interpretations adopted because they advance someone’s agenda, rather than accuracy.” ~Gary Galles

Congress Could Unload the Fed’s Weapon

“If Congress could balance its budget, which hasn’t happened since 2001, it would remove a bullet the Fed could shoot at the economy.” ~Vance Ginn

Wendy’s Won’t Use Dynamic Pricing – But Should They?

“The discount shelf in your lower supermarket is emblematic of the same process as well, albeit in the opposite direction. Variable pricing permits improved resource allocations, including of labor, by responding to real-time conditions.” ~Peter C. Earle

Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time?

“No matter what your specialization, whether in economics or in any other field, Cowen has written a book which is trying to convince you to break out of your specialization and rediscover the broader world of ideas.” ~James Hartley

Milton Friedman Was More Like F.A. Hayek Than He Likely Knew

“While both men won the Nobel Prize in economics – Hayek in 1974 and Friedman in 1976 – economists regard the scholarly work of Hayek as differing almost categorically from that of Friedman.” ~Donald J. Boudreaux

Are CEOs overpaid?

“Behavioral economics contributes the insight that different kinds of compensation incentivize, reward, and support different kinds of behavior, so a range of justifications for executive compensation may come into play and need to be considered by directors and the compensation committee.” ~Robert Mulligan

On Exceptions to the Rule of a Policy of Free Trade

“Justification of a policy of free trade does not rest on the claim that free trade in each and every case yields ‘optimal’ results, or a stream of results as excellent as those that would be achieved by protectionist policies.” ~Donald J. Boudreaux

Bookstore Protectionism

“Both past and present suits claimed that the problem was dominant sellers unfairly harming independents, which thereby undermined competition. But in that, they misrepresented both what competition means and who was harming less-successful competitors.” ~Gary M. Galles

The Mating of Economic Ideas and Bitcoin

“As Bitcoin is a highly decentralized and antifragile system with no real-world backed assets that can be seized to shut it down, appears to be the only realistic candidate to introduce something that government cannot stop.” ~ Emile Phaneuf III

The Essential Ethic of Socialism

“In a socialist regime, I must seek the permission of others — whether state officials or one’s fellow workers — before I serve them in a novel way.” ~ Adam Martin

Reconstruction of Economics

Industrial Policy Does Indeed Fall Victim to the Knowledge Problem

“Prices, asset values, and profits and losses determined in open markets in which people spend and invest their own (and only their own) money are the only sources of information in a modern economy about which resource uses are worthwhile and which resource uses aren’t worthwhile.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux