I have just enjoyed watching the Chicago Cubs win a World Series game. In economic terms, it produced “utility” for me, a highfaluting way of saying it made me feel better, more satisfied, happier. But that is only part of…
Category: Other
Neither Clinton nor Trump will ruin our nation
Wildly exaggerated rhetoric is one of the most visible manifestations of how dysfunctional U.S. politics have become. Donald Trump clearly leads the pack of political candidates in this, but nonsensical and inflammatory claims bubble out of all sides of the…
Some get profiled, others get privilege
Some people pooh-pooh the existence of bigotry, but I myself, an elderly white guy, have been profiled against repeatedly recently — and it ain’t pretty folks! Yet often snap judgments based on cursory information, including appearance, are economically efficient. Social…
2016 economics Nobels a timely teaching moment
It couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. On Monday of last week, the Nobel Foundation announced the award of the 2016 prize for economics to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom. On Wednesday, John Stumpf, the Wells Fargo CEO, who had…
A reading list for the Little Library vandals
A terrible thing happened in my neighborhood. Someone took all the books out of several Little Libraries, the ornate wooden boxes that people put in front of their houses to facilitate reading. As I was in a somber mood already…
‘Terrorism’ isn’t going away, so how are we going to respond?
Every day in America, indeed around the globe, we collectively substantiate the thoughts of the great 19th-century Swiss military thinker Antoine-Henri Jomini. Indeed, if he and Osama bin Laden and Muhammed Atta were somehow looking across the great divide to…
Lessons of value of public investment have been forgotten
Fundamental trade-offs often are the same regardless of the scale of the organization in question. That thought hit me as I read an article about a county board meeting in a weekly newspaper back home while getting new tires on…
Modern CEOs should be glad they are not generals
John Stumpf, chairman and CEO of Wells Fargo, should be glad the legal principles the U.S. Supreme Court imposed on now largely exonerated Japanese World War II Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita are not applied to banking violations. If they were, Stumpf’s…
Gun noise debate speaks loudly to economists
Basic, and sophisticated, economic ideas can show up in the most real-world of situations, such as the ongoing bickering over a police gun range in Maplewood. Indeed, the case involves insights that win Nobel prizes. And while this situation affects…
Drug, medical device patents always pose knotty problems
The recent outcry about the pricing of EpiPens reinforces what we already know: Monopolies, particularly those that produce highly needed items, can do harm, even evil. But people have long recognized that there can be such a thing as a…