Innovation and exchange can be frustratingly uninspiring, particularly given that there are concentrated, vivid costs (in the form of lost jobs and struggling communities) and benefits dispersed across millions of…
Economy
On Christmas Eve, 2022, in North Carolina, something happened that had never happened before in living memory. People across the state were alerted by their power company, Duke Energy, that…
Polling data suggests that many Americans see government spending as one of the primary drivers of inflation. Economic theory, however, tells us that the relationship between the two phenomena is…
Seven years ago, I pointed out a problem with the “market failure” justification for state action against markets. This objection has become more, not less, important with the passage of…
Stanford University’s information technology community produced, and then hid, a document entitled “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” Stanford didn’t adopt the EOHLI document. The fact that Stanford has not directly…
An interest rate is a price: the price of rented capital. Alternatively, interest is the price of time. It’s the cost borrowers pay to transfer purchasing power from their future…
If news of inflation and recession has you feeling a bit Grinchy, some historical perspective might put some joy back into the season. Our current economic woes are significant, and…
If you haven’t been following the “Twitter Files” saga, the gist of it is that the US federal government routinely pressured pre-Musk Twitter, and likely other social media giants including…
New orders for durable goods fell 2.1 percent in November, following a 0.7 percent gain in October. Total durable-goods orders are up 10.6 percent from a year ago. The November…
Sales of new single-family homes rose again in November, increasing 5.8 percent to 640,000 at a seasonally-adjusted annual rate from a 605,000 pace in October. The November gain was the…