January 2003

Yesterday, having been lured downtown by an opportunity to gaze into Virginia Postrel's eyes, I stumbled on Nobel Laureate Michael Spence giving a talk on the Internet and productivity. Some major points were: 1. Before the Internet, computing was a... MORE

Glenn (Instapundit) Reynolds links to a pessimistic treatment of economic growth by Michael Rogers. In my little part of the world that sample has included advertising agency people, a television executive, two doctors, a lawyer, a retail stockbroker, a building... MORE

How has rent control worked in New York City? Exactly as textbooks would have predicted, according to this essay by William Tucker in the New York Post. During the 1920s, builders put up nearly 100,000 new apartment units a year.... MORE

Brad DeLong describes the 20th century as "slouching towards utopia." He views prospects for the next 20 years as even brighter. Today's ongoing revolutions in biotechnology-and-information technology see technological progress of at least 15% per year in industries that make... MORE

For an antidote to the interventionist Atlantic Monthly, see this open letter signed by a number of conservative economists. As a rule, government cannot create wealth or expand the economy. Only the private sector can do that. Government can, however,... MORE

In the Atlantic Monthly's "State of the Union" issue, Ted Halstead says that for the American economy it is the best of times and the worst of times. We boast more patent applications than the entire European Union; almost three... MORE

EconLog is a Web Log, or Blog. My view is that some of the value of blogs comes from the collective filtering that they provide. I sketch a sort of economic model, in which everyone lives on a circle, with... MORE

When asked by edge.org's John Brockman what he would do if he were science advisor to the President, Steven Pinker's reply included: Observers from our best science writers to Jay Leno are frequently appalled by the innumeracy, factual ignorance, and... MORE