On a couple of nights of our vacation in Maui, a large cruise boat would be anchored several hundred yards out from Lahaina harbor. Not being familiar with how cruise boats operate, given that neither my husband nor I has ever been on a cruise, we amused ourselves with speculation on several of the operating …
Asset Specificity And The Boundary Of The Firm: Cruise Boats Read More »
Jonathan Wilde’s superb post on the emergent order that has arisen online, with specific reference to weblogs, mentions a lot of themes that are important for understanding human institutions in general, and for my own work in electricity deregulation and restructuring. His analysis of Technorati as a mechanism for supporting unplanned order is bang on; …
Another juicy tidbit is this Angry Economist posting on monopoly, competition, and antitrust. I appreciate the spirit in which he argues that antitrust laws may be unnecessary or even counterproductive: Perhaps, you might wish to argue, antitrust laws could be used in those market segments which are difficult to enter. No. Even then a public …
I think Frederic Bastiat was one of the most insightful writers on state power. He starts off his major work, The Law, with a bang in the introduction: If every person has the right to defend even by force-his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the …
I’ve forgotten to check Eric Rasmusen’s blog lately, and in revisiting there this morning I noticed his interesting post on Pascal, proof and custom. The passage he chose to quote, from Pensees, is striking, and not something that I’ve typically associated with Pascal: For we must not misunderstand ourselves; we are as much automatic as …
While we’re at Tech Central Station, this great article by Pete Geddes on economic evolution deserves a read. Geddes hits on a theme that is a core component of my work — thinking of the economy as an organic system instead of as a mechanistic system. Like biological systems, economic life evolves as people and …
Arnold Kling’s superb Tech Central Station article on the elastic economy makes a lot of very important points, and ties up quite a few conceptual loose ends into a neat analysis. Kling argues that over the past 50 years the economy has become more elastic, more robust, and better able to adjust to unanticipated changes. …
That’s the question I posed, and on which I offered some thoughts, in the fifth of our five-part hydrogen series. Punch line: the government doesn’t do a better job than any other group of folks, and arguably does a worse job because it has no mechanisms for saying “no”. Markets provide ready mechanisms for funding, …
In this commentary on NPR’s Morning Edition on Friday, Russell Roberts explains how oil companies cannot “gouge” us with high gas prices. You can also read a transcript of the commentary. Here’s the intro, to entice you to read the whole thing: Whenever gas prices go up, we hear about the power of oil companies …
This Christian Science Monitor article and this Economist article provide some insightful analysis on the economic costs of high oil prices. Regular readers of this page will already know much of what’s contained in these articles — the unfortunate concatenation of Venezuelan unrest, possible war in Iraq, and an unusually cold winter in the US …
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive