The Becker-posner Blog
Coming soon, a blog by Gary Becker and Richard Posner. Should be fun.
Economics
Shopping, Style, And Snobbery: We’re Lucky
Lynne Kiesling In catching up on the mail and newspaper yesterday after returning home, I was excited to read Virginia Postrel’s Wall Street Journal Weekend section column on shopping and fashion magazines (subscription required). Virginia sees an independence and creativity in the emergence and popularity of shopping magazines relative to old fashion stalwarts like Vogue …
Profile Of Ronald Coase, And His Penguin … ?
Lynne Kiesling Thanks to the invaluable Will Wilkinson for his link to this U. of C. Chronicle article profiling Ronald Coase: Coase said that ?it?s very difficult to imagine a system that would work better than one with private property rights and a market: mechanisms that have proved themselves repeatedly against regimes where central authority …
What We’re Not Doing In Iraq
Pat Lynch At a conference on economics and social processes that I attended this past weekend, Vernon Smith, raised an issue that has bugged me quite a bit since we began our invasion of Iraq. Why has this administration said so little publicly about the development of capitalism, not merely democracy, in Iraq? Vernon said …
Patent Reform II
Lynne Kiesling [NOTE: this post is a continuation of the immediately preceding one.] The second Economist article (subscription required) goes into more detail regarding the problems and proposed reforms. First, the article usefully references Innovation and Its Discontents, a new book on patenting by Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner (two of the most knowledgeable IP …
Patent Reform I
Lynne Kiesling This week’s Economist has a couple of good articles about the need for patent law reform. The first one (subscription required), entitled “Monopolies of the Mind”, starts off with a great quote from Thomas Jefferson: PATENTS, said Thomas Jefferson, should draw ?a line between the things which are worth to the public the …
Google Cranks Up My Productivity, Again
Lynne Kiesling All I can say is uff-dah! Google has released Google Scholar, a search engine that searches more specific scholarly sources. For example, I ran this search on “reactive power”, and it turned up a bunch of useful engineering citations that would be more difficult for me to find through my university library. And …
Wal-Mart’s Effects On Retail Gasoline Markets
Lynne Kiesling Over at Truck and Barter, Kevin has a post on Wal-Mart’s next victims now that they’ve stomped all over the large toy store model. One of the next victims that Forbes names is retail gasoline. Retail gasoline is a natural extension of the Wal-Mart business model. Sourcing the product through a distributed supply …
Update On Kp Ohio Homework
Lynne Kiesling So I got two submissions for the Ohio voting outcome homework assignment: one from my virtuoso former student David Stone (and I can only, maybe, take epsilon credit for his virtuosity), and one from Ian Cook at Truck and Barter. Both got to where I expected, but took different routes to get there. …
More Science Needed To Counter Campus Half-Truths And Superstition
Michael Giberson As any college student can tell you, the halls of academe are filled with half-truths and superstition masquerading as wisdom. No, I?m not talking about liberal bias among the professoriat. I?m talking about the student-to-student guidance about which foods, drinks, and other substances one should eat, drink or otherwise ingest in the attempt …
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