Especially interesting was this: "LESSON #2: Calling bubbles is easy, making money is hard." Another version of the old wisecrack, "The market can stay irrational longer than you can solvent."
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Guess. Go ahead, guess.
"Conventional history of the exodus out of cities ignores numerous complex and interrelated causes."
Yes, indeed. Not that that will stop the dopey attempts to extend antitrust law.
If you haven't watched some of Hans Rosling's videos on YouTube, they are a treat.
Short academic piece freely available by Peter Leeson. Abstract:
Every economic explanation assumes maximization. How strange, then, that few economists accept one of maximization’s most straightforward implications: every observed institution is efficient. My aim is to persuade economists of this fact and thus to dissuade them from making illogical claims about social welfare. To frame my argument, I consider the “property rights approach” to institutions developed by Yoram Barzel. I speculate that economists resist what maximization implies about institutional efficiency the world because they think that efficiency-always precludes them from improving the world, and hope of improving the world is what attracted them to economics in the first place. But, besides being inconsistent, resistance is unnecessary: efficiency-always does not preclude economists, or anyone else, from improving the world.
Reminds me of the day during the first quarter of my graduate study at UCLA when Armen Alchian, in about 15 seconds, utterly destroyed, to the astonishment of the assembled students, the concept of Pareto optimality. "Meaningless."
As is often the case economics provides a straightforward answer.
Economist Ed Yardeni says, "No!" I sure hope he's right.
Distinguished economist Edward Glaeser proposes some eminently sensible reforms that, in a better world, would be supported by both political parties. But given our current climate, I'm pessimistic.
An effective alternative to the status quo and social democracy must, I believe, focus on empowering outsiders. Many of those outsiders have suffered significantly during the pandemic, and insiders should be willing to sacrifice a few of their privileges as compensation. To build a political agenda around the four freedoms of learning, working, selling, and building, four specific policies would provide a good start.
Hint: replacing them all would be hellaciously expensive.