Results for “alex tabarrok” 208 found
Tabarrok on Econ Talk on Private Cities
Based on my paper, Lessons from Gurgaon, India’s Private City (with Shruti Rajagopalan) I discuss private cities with Russ Roberts over at EconTalk this week.
I think the conversation went well but I haven’t heard it yet so let me also take the time to point you to my favorite recent EconTalk, Russ interviewing Greg Page, the former CEO of Cargill, the largest privately-held company in America. Their discussion covers the global food supply, false definitions of national food security, the role of prices, comparative advantage and more. It’s a great discussion.
A Critique of Tabarrok on Bundling
In my MRUniversity video on the economics of bundling I argue that bundling raises total surplus and that requiring the Cable TV companies to price by the channel is unlikely to reduce most people’s cable bill (see also Does Cable TV Ripoff People Who Don’t Like Sports?). Pragmatarianism offers an excellent critique. Here is one bit from a longer post worth reading in full:
The flaw in Tabarrok’s logic is that it completely ignores the necessity of determining what the actual demand is for the individual components in the bundle. For example, when I subscribed to cable…Charter had no idea how much I valued the Discovery Channel. Neither did the Discovery Channel. But is my valuation relevant? According to Tabarrok…it really isn’t. Uh, what?
How could the Discovery Channel and Charter and Tabarrok not care what the actual demand is for the Discovery Channel? In the absence of consumer valuation…how could society’s limited resources be put to their most valuable uses?
Tabarrok is basically arguing that we don’t need accurate information in order to efficiently allocate resources. Except, does he really believe that? Let me consult my magic database…The most valuable public goods are constantly changing, just as the most valuable private goods are constantly changing. The signal provided by prices and mobility is therefore of great importance. – Alexander Tabarrok, in The Voluntary City
Huh. Hmmm. Is the Discovery Channel a private good? Yes. Is its value constantly changing? Yes. So…according to Tabarrok…it’s of great importance that the Discovery Channel should have its own price. But this sure wasn’t what he said in his video.
An excellent point that was made most forcefully by Ronald Coase in The Marginal Cost Controversy. Coase argued that pricing goods with high fixed cost at marginal cost would generate static efficiency but at the price of dynamic efficiency because we would not be able to say with assurance that the total value of the product exceeded total cost. Similarly we lose some information with bundling, perhaps especially so because marginal cost in this case is zero. With bundling, we know that the total value of the bundle exceeds the total cost but we are less certain that the total value of each bundle component (channel) exceeds the total cost of each component.
But this cannot be the whole story because in another paper, The Nature of the Firm, Coase pointed out that sometimes we choose not to use prices. Firms, for example, are islands of central planning in a market ocean (see Yglesias for a good discussion).
A channel such as HBO is itself a bundle of dramas, comedies and documentaries. Should Girls and Game of Thrones always be priced and sold separately and not through the HBO bundle? HBO certainly learns something from individually priced downloads on iTunes and that information helps HBO to improve its service. But how much is this information worth?
In 2002 should HBO have individually priced episodes of the Sopranos and sold them through AOL? Individual pricing generates value but it also has costs. Tradeoffs are everywhere. And, to the crux of the issue, if a law had been passed in 2002 requiring HBO to sell The Sopranos on an episode by episode basis would that have resulted in better and more programming at lower prices? I think not. Similarly, I see few reasons to think that welfare would be improved by a law requiring cable TV companies to price by channel.
More generally, the price system is embedded in the larger field of the market economy which includes non-price institutions such as firms; and the market economy is embedded in the larger field of civil society which includes non-profits and non-market institutions such as the family. Economists often focus on the virtues of the price system but that should not blind us to the many virtues and many margins on which a free society operates.
Summers, Lomborg, Tabarrok, and Cowen on climate change
There was a brief symposium, here are the results:
Larry Summers
President Emeritus of Harvard University, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank
My sense is that cap and trade is not the route to the future. It did not make it politically in the US at a moment of great opportunity in 2009. And European carbon markets have been plagued by constant problems. And globally it’s even harder. My sense is that the right strategy has three major elements. First, as the G20 vowed in 2009, there needs to be a concerted phase out of fossil fuel subsidies. This would help government budgets, drive increases in economic efficiency and substantially reduce global emissions. Second, there needs to be assurance of adequate funding for all areas of basic energy research. As a practical matter my guess is the world will produce non fossil fuel power in the next 25 years at today s fossil fuel prices or it will fail with respect to global climate change. Third, there is a strong case for concerted carbon taxes to further discourage greenhouse gas emissions. But this is a follow-on step for after the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies.
Bjorn Lomborg
Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School
The only way to move towards a long-term reduction in emissions is if green energy becomes much cheaper. If it cost less than fossil fuels, everyone would switch, including the Chinese. This, of course, requires breakthroughs in green technologies and much more innovation.
At the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate (fixtheclimate.com), a panel of economists, including three Nobel laureates, found that the best long-term strategy to tackle global warming was to increase dramatically investment in green research and development. They suggested doing so 10-fold to $100bn a year globally. This would equal 0.2% of global GDP. Compare this to the EU’s climate policies, which cost $280 billion a year but reduce temperatures by a trivial 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
Alex Tabarrok
Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University
Neither the developed nor the developing world will accept large reductions in their standard of living. As a result, the only solution to global climate change is innovations in green technology. A carbon tax will induce innovation as people demand a way to avoid the tax. A carbon tax, however, will be more politically acceptable if technologies to avoid the tax are in existence before the tax is put into place. Prizes for green innovations can blaze a path down a road that must be traveled, making the trip easier. The L-prize successfully induced innovation in LED technologies, the X-Prize put a spacecraft into near space twice within two weeks and Google’s Lunar X prize for putting a robot on the moon is close to being awarded. Prizes have proven their worth. To speed both the creation and diffusion of green technology, green prizes should be awarded at the rate of $100-$200 million annually.
Tyler Cowen
Professor of Economics, George Mason University
This is a problem we are failing to solve. Keep in mind it is not just about getting the wealthy countries to switch to greener technologies, but we also desire that emerging economies will find green technology more profitable than dirty coal. A carbon tax is one way forward but the odds are that will not be enough and besides many countries are unlikely to adopt one anytime soon. Subsidies for technology could occur at a very basic level and we could make a gamble that nuclear fusion will finally pay off. We also need a version of green technology that will fit into existing energy infrastructures and into countries which do not have the most reliable institutions. The most likely scenario is that we will find out just how bad the climate change problem is slated to be.
There are further responses at the link.
Addendum: Ashok Rao adds comments.
The Tabarrok Curve in the WSJ
Matt Ridley covers patents and the Tabarrok Curve in the WSJ:
The economist Arthur Laffer is reputed to have drawn his famous curve—showing that beyond a certain point higher taxes generate lower revenue—on a paper napkin at a dinner with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in the Washington Hotel in 1974.
Another economist, Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University, last year drew a similar curve on a virtual napkin to argue that, beyond a certain point, greater protection for intellectual property causes less innovation. He thinks that U.S. patent law is well beyond that optimal point.
Last week the Supreme Court came out against the patenting of genes, on the grounds that they are discoveries, not inventions, though it did allow that edited copies of the DNA of a breast cancer gene should be seen as invented diagnostic tools. Dr. Tabarrok thinks that decision and other recent rulings are nudging patent law back in the right direction after a protectionist drift in the 1980s and ’90s.
Jude Wanniski and the Wall Street Journal made the Laffer curve famous so I have high hopes!
Alex’s new book
It is by far the best book on how to fix our current innovation dilemma and it is entitled appropriately Launching the Innovation Renaissance (Amazon link, B&N for Nook, also iTunes). I’ve read it twice and bought it once, even though Alex might have given me a copy had I asked, and now I am reviewing it once and probably will review it again.
Good thing he didn’t ask Alex to explain the Solow growth model (in French)
He asked an Air Canada fight attendant for 7Up and he got Sprite.
“I’m a little bit disappointed with the lower amount awarded,” Thibodeau said. “But the positive note is that the court recognized our rights were violated on several occasions.”
…So, in 2009, when Thibodeau ordered a 7Up in French, and the English-speaking attendant brought him a — gasp! — different brand of lemon-lime soda, he sued.
“If I take a flight and I’m not served in the language of my choice, and I don’t do anything about it, then my right is basically dead,” Thibodeau told The Globe and Mail. “I was not asking for anything other than what I was already entitled to. I have a right to be served in French.”
It’s a right that Thibodeau — who is a federal employee and happens to speak perfect English — takes very, very seriously.
The full story is here. I suppose one could make a living this way. Which are the French questions most likely to be misunderstood by an English-speaking Canadian? From another article:
It is Thibodeau’s second successful legal action against the airline and its subsidiaries. In 2000, he was refused service in French when he tried to order a 7Up from a unilingual English flight attendant on an Air Ontario flight from Montreal to Ottawa.
Thibodeau filed suit in Federal Court for $525,000 in damages. The court upheld his complaint, ordered the airline to make a formal apology and pay him $5,375.95. Thibodeau was later honoured by the French-language rights group, Imperatif Francais.
For the pointers I thank Graham Rowe. Alex and I explain the Solow growth model — in English — here. Chinese, Spanish, and other editions are on the way.
My favorite things *Modern Principles* (Cowen and Tabarrok)
I'm writing to thank so many of you for your interest in Modern Principes: Microeconomics, Modern Principles: Macroeconomics, and the two-in-one edition. Alex and I have been pleased to see how many of you have adopted the book or shown interest in it; all the books are doing great and thanks to your interest. Translations to other languages are already in the works.
Here are a few of my favorite things Modern Principles:
1. It has the most thorough treatment of the interconnectedness of markets and the importance of the price system; most texts only pay lip service to this.
2. It is the most Hayekian of the texts on micro theory without in any way ignoring the importance of externalities, public goods and other challenges to markets.
3. It has an entire chapter on ethics and economics. We do present economics as a value-free science, yet we all know how much ethics shapes people's economics views. The book helps the student sort out common confusions and explains the ethical presuppositions behind many "economic" arguments.
4. It has an entire chapter on incentives and incentive design (e.g. piece rates, tournaments, pay for performance). Oddly, many micro books do not discuss this crucial topic.
5. International examples–from Algeria to Zimbabwe–are written into the core of the book and not just ghettoized in a single "international chapter."
6. It is obsessed with the idea of teaching students to think like economists.
7. It is grounded in the belief that reading an economics text should be fun, not a chore.
8. It has balanced coverage of neo-Keynesian and real business cycle approaches.
9. It covers Solow "catch-up" growth, and Paul Romer's increasing returns, much more thoroughly than do the other texts. The macro book (section) starts off with the idea of why growth matters and is central to macroeconomics.
10. The financial crisis was written into the core of the book, rather than being absent or treated as an add-on. This means for instance plenty of coverage of financial intermediation and asset price bubbles.
11. The book's blog, a teaching tool with lots of videos, powerpoints and other ideas for keeping teaching exciting, is lots of fun and updated regularly (FYI, this is a great resource for any instructor of economics.)
In addition, of course, there is a full range of supplements including lecture powerpoints, test banks, student's guide, Aplia support and coming in the fall EconPortal (even better than Aplia, IMHO).
Alex’s conniptions
The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society, edited by David Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alex Tabarrok. It's very much anti-zoning. Here you can look inside the book. I am genuinely puzzled by this progressive meme that GMU economists don't speak out adequately against zoning and in favor of more diverse, more vital, and more practical urban environments.
TED interviews Tabarrok
Following up on my TED talk, is this interview with Matthew Trost. We cover whether limited natural resources are a constraint on growth, the Lebensraum fallacy, The Wire, the tragedy of the commons and other topics. Here's one bit on growth and democracy in the context of China and India.
A lot of people say that India has been held back by its democracy. But let’s remember that despite being a poor country India’s democracy meant that its government never let millions of people starve. No politician wants to starve potential voters. In the long run, I think India is going to benefit from its democracy and not be harmed by it. Democracy is, in a sense, like markets. It provides information and feedback, it leads to a more open system and it constrains government from the worst kinds of abuses. I think that the more China proceeds along the wealth path, the more difficult they will find it not to have a democracy.
The credit crunch: I still cannot agree with Alex and Bryan
Alex is a very good truth-tracker but on credit I remain stubborn in my belief that there is a credit crunch. Here is one report:
How is trade finance coping with the credit crunch
Badly. Steve Rodley, director of London-based shipping hedge-fund Global Maritime Investments, puts it bluntly: "The whole shipping market has crashed." The trouble is that credit is the lifeblood of commerce, but it is built entirely on trust. And that has evaporated. As such, many ship owners can’t get banks to issue letters of credit, particularly on cargoes of price-volatile commodities that no longer look like adequate collateral. Even those who can get letters of credit are finding that their counterparties may no longer trust the credit rating of anything other than large, well-established banks, many of which are now charging big premiums. Letters now cost three times the going rate of a year ago, according to Lynn.
Here is another report. Here are other reports. Or read this account:
What’s more, the dollar-denominated trade finance lines that exporter companies rely upon to do business are drying up in dramatic fashion amid the global credit crunch. In Brazil — the world’s top exporter of beef, iron ore, sugar and coffee and the No. 2 exporter of soy — total outstanding trade lines have fallen by half this month to around $18 billion.
Here are simple and in my view decisive quantitative indicators of the current domestic credit crisis. Or here is another report:
According to experts interviewed by Bloomberg, "letters of credit and the credit lines for trade currently are frozen," and as a result, "nothing is moving".
Or here is a recent survey of U.S. retailing CFOs:
Some 41 percent of US retailers are seeing tight credit as a result of
the crisis in the banking sector, and many will cut staff and reduce
buying as a result…
Many other surveys paint a similar picture. I can only repeat my earlier words that immediate credit flows are demand-driven and they do not measure bad credit conditions concurrently because they stem from prior bank commitments. To suggest, as commentator Tom does (and Alex endorses), that we have no credit crisis until lines of credit are exhausted, is in my view sheer logomachy (I like that word). Nor is my view "convenient" or unfalsifiable as was suggested. Here is Wikipedia on lagging indicators and yes it tells you that standard forms of credit fall into this category and this has been understood for some time. Look instead at the currently informative pieces of the evidence and you will see that they point in a very consistent direction.
It is true that many credit channels have not shut down. But the ones
that are shutting down are enough to cause a severe global recession.
Addendum: I added this comment to the discussion: "People, financial markets and financial institutions around the world
are falling apart. I’m not pulling this stuff out of a hat or from a
few crazy journalists. There is massive disintermediation going on
right now, much of it in the shadow banking system. I am trying not to
be dogmatic but it is hard for me to see on what grounds anyone would
deny this."
Tabarrok’s Offer
Pascal’s Wager came up at the great debate the other night and Bryan Caplan was kind enough to refer to my paper as the definitive refutation. Coincidentally, a reader in search of counsel on matters economic and theological writes to the Financial Times’s Dear Economist who replies by trying to take the vig out of my scam ministry!
The economist Alex Tabarrok points out that if there is even a tiny
chance that Pascal is right, a tiny chance of a tiny chance of a second
of infinite bliss is still infinitely valuable.Now, if you give
me all your money, I’ll intercede with God on your behalf and increase
your chance of going to heaven. Of course, there is only a tiny chance
that my intercession will help, but a tiny chance of infinite bliss is,
again, infinitely valuable.Please send your cheque via the FT, and quickly please – I’ve already given Professor Tabarrok all my cash.
Alex and the FDA in Forbes
This week’s Forbes (the Nov. 1 issue) has a feature story on Alex’s work to make drug regulation more sensible.
Alex notes that off-label drug uses are largely unregulated. No proof of efficacy is required, and off-label drug prescriptions bring a net health gain; see this paper. Yet to get a new drug approved it must go through, in addition to Phase I trials,
…Phase II and Phase III trials, which typically take years and focus on efficacy as well as safety. The long wait can cost lives and runs up new-drug costs–to an estimated $900 million per successful drug.
Tabarrok says this system makes little sense; the FDA demands costly, time-consuming efficacy tests for some uses and no tests for others. And while the FDA allows off-label prescribing by docs, it strictly limits the drugmakers’ promotion of such uses to doctors and permits none at all to patients.
Alex argues that FDA regulation ought to be reduced, making the regulation of new and old drugs more consistent. But that is not all:
Tabarrok and [Dan] Klein also offer some alternative proposals at FDAReview.org. One is to make all FDA testing optional. Drugs that didn’t go through the process would be labeled “Not FDA Approved.” Under this approach, they say, “the FDA would become a genuinely voluntary institution, much like Underwriters Laboratories.” Another idea is for the FDA to award letter grades, A to D, to claims made by drugmakers, much as it is considering doing for health claims for foods and dietary supplements. The FDA could still have its say, but wouldn’t be able to impose long delays, since a new drug could be marketed at first as “unrated.”
At the least, Tabarrok argues, the FDA should permit drug companies to sell any drug that has been approved by other sophisticated drug regulators, such as those in Canada, Australia or the European Union. Under such a system U.S. patients would get speedier access to new medicines without losing out on safety protection.
Kudos to Alex, the only sorrow is that the on-line version does not reproduce the excellent photo of him in the magazine. But you can see that at your local Borders.
Why I am not as pessimistic as Alex
Alex, citing Larry Kotlikoff, despairs for our fiscal future, read his earlier post as well.
I agree with the Krugman-DeLong-A.Sullivan-Tabarrok (if I may call it that) critique of current fiscal policies. But I don’t agree that our government is “bankrupt,” or accept the cited claim by Kotlikoff that “our country is in worse long-term fiscal shape than Brazil.” Neither is close to being true, check out Brazil’s BB bond rating for a start.
What is the real cost of our fiscal irresponsibility? First, we could be using current resources more effectively. But productivity trends have been strongly positive for some time now. So while things could and should be better, current magnitudes are not themselves evidence of disaster.
Second, when the time comes to pay off the debts, we will require some combination of inflation, spending cuts, and tax increases. Since most of the debt is short-term, inflation won’t do it. The real problem has to be taxes. Spending cuts Alex probably favors, at least I get that feeling reading the guy’s blog. The danger is that we will end up with Western European levels of taxation, stifling our entrepreneurial culture.
So the real cost of our current fiscal irresponsibility is the increase in deadweight loss, resulting from the required increase in taxation, as will be needed to pay off all those trillions. The real cost is not equal to the number of trillions that need to be paid back. And most of the associated transfers are within a generation (tax some living people to pay off bondholders, other living people at the time), rather than across the generations. Let’s not confuse the size of the deficit, or the debt, with the size of the intergenerational transfer.
Keep two other things in mind as well. First, there is some chance that the growth rate of the economy will exceed the real rate of interest. In that case we can simply grow out of our debt, which over time will become small relative to the size of the economy. It is irresponsible for a government to take the risk of spending on this basis. Nonetheless it is at least possible that, in technical parlance, “g > r”.
Second, America will likely experience favorable demographics. Here is Nicholas Eberstadt:
…the United States is envisioned to grow from 285 million in 2000 to 358 million in 2025. In absolute terms, this would be by far the greatest increase projected for any industrialized society; in relative terms, this projected 26 percent increment would almost exactly match the proportional growth of the Asia/Eurasia region as a whole. Under these trajectories, the United States would remain the world’s third most populous country in 2025, and by the early 2020s, the U.S. population growth rate – a projected 0.7 percent per year – would in this scenario actually be higher than that of Indonesia, Thailand, or virtually any country in East Asia, China included.
No, that won’t solve the problem but it is a help.
I should note that Alex and I probably do not disagree about the economics of the matter (if we do, you will hear from him soon enough). But I think he is neglecting the importance of the following:
The United States remains a strong and prosperous country. Our infrastructure, national culture of innovation, human capital, and economic dynamism are unparalelled in world history. The Bush fiscal policies, whatever their irresponsibilities, costs, and drawbacks, haven’t changed those core facts.
So I walked down to Alex’s office and issued him the following challenge: if you think I am wrong, sell all your stocks and go short on U.S. Treasury securities (and long on Brazil, if you wish!). With all the money you will make, you can buy out my half of this blog.
More on the Xbox shortage
I’m finishing an MA in Economics at Boston University right now, and am also the author of "PSX: The Guide to the Sony Playstation" which is being released this week. In the course of research for the book, I interviewed a number of VPs at Sony about why they priced at 299 when the PS2 came out. The waits for the PS2, in fact, were much longer than those for the Xbox360, and still no rise in prices.
Here’s my understanding of the pricing situation:
1) Console prices are announced months in advance of the system release, unlike many other products. There is a general consensus that a price above 299 (or 399, perhaps, which is the true price of the 360) will be unsuccessful. In the mid and late 90s, a huge number of consoles bombed by announcing prices of 400-1000 (Sega Saturn, cd-i, 3DO, Amiga CD32, etc.). Third party developers are essential to a system’s success (a system without games, after all, does nothing), and in order to have games ready for a system, they evaluate a system a year before launch. A high price would discourage developers -> discourage games -> lessen demand. Given the competitiveness of the console game market, I have no doubt that major third-party game producers (Activision, Ubisoft, Square, EA, etc.) would balk if Microsoft were to raise prices, fearing, justly or not, that system sales two years down the road (when their games are ready) will be lower. For the 500-pound gorillas (EA in particular) there might even be contractual stipulations with MS about the system price.
The other reason is the one Alex gave – The $700 consoles on ebay represent the highest WTP on the demand curve, not the average. Personally, I don’t think MS would’ve sold 500k Xboxes at $500. Why MS didn’t auction off "limited edition" systems early, as you said, remains a mystery though. Nintendo has done exactly that with some items (in charity auctions, however).
In any case, the basic pricing structure is no mystery at all. MS needs to satisfy both end-users AND third-party developers, not just end-users. They’re selling a *platform* more than a product.
New issue of Econ Journal Watch
This is now twenty years of Econ Journal Watch, congratulations to Dan Klein! Here is the table of contents:
Volume 20, Number 2, September 2023
Screening the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation: In an article in the American Economic Review, Desmond Ang purports to show causal impact of screenings of the film between 1915 and 1919 on lynchings, on the formation and growth of Ku Klux Klan chapters between 1920 and 1925, and on hate crimes in the early 2000s. Here, concurring that the film itself reeks of racism, Robert Kaestner scrutinizes Ang’s data and analyses, and challenges the claims of causal evidence of effects from 1915–1919 screenings of the film. (Note: Professor Ang was not invited to reply for concurrent publication because Kaestner’s piece was finalized at too late a date. Professor Ang is invited to reply in a future issue.)
Temperature-economic growth claims tested again: Having tested temperature-economic growth claims previously in this journal (here and here), David Barker now reports on his investigation into much-cited articles by Melissa Dell, Benjamin Jones, and Benjamin Olken, published in the American Economic Review in 2009 and the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics in 2012. As with the two previous pieces by Barker, the commented-on authors have declined to reply (the invitation remains open).
Debating the causes of the Ukraine famine of the early 1930s: Two scholars interpret the complex causes of a tragedy that caused the loss of perhaps three million souls. Natalya Naumenko’s research on the causes of the Ukraine famine is discussed by Mark Tauger, and Naumenko replies.
Ergodicity economics, debated: A number of scholars have advanced an approach to decision making under uncertainty called ergodicity economics. A critique is provided here by Matthew Ford and John Kay, who maintain that psychology is fundamental to any general theory of decision making under uncertainty. Eleven proponents of ergodicity economics have coauthored a reply. They suggest that the critique is based on an incomplete understanding of ergodicity economics, and point to two sources of misunderstanding. The replying authors are Oliver Hulme, Arne Vanhoyweghen, Colm Connaughton, Ole Peters, Simon Steinkamp, Alexander Adamou, Dominik Baumann, Vincent Ginis, Bert Verbruggen, James Price, and Benjamin Skjold.
Dispute resolution on hospitals, communication, and dispute resolution? Previously, Florence R. LeCraw, Daniel Montanera, and Thomas A. Mroz (LMM) criticized the statistical methods of a 2018 article in Health Affairs. Here, Maayan Yitshak-Sade, Allen Kachalia, Victor Novack, and Michelle M. Mello provide a reply to LMM, and LMM provide a rejoinder to them.
Aaron Gamino rejoins on health insurance mandates and the marriage of young adults: Previously, Aaron Gamino commented on the statistical modeling in a 2022 Journal of Human Resources article, whose authors, Scott Barkowski and Joanne Song McLaughlin, replied. Here now Gamino provides a rejoinder.
A History of Classical Liberalism in the Netherlands: Edwin van de Haar narrates the classical liberal movements in the Netherlands, from the Dutch Golden Age, through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and down to today. The article extends the series on Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country.
To Russia with love: The conservative liberal Boris Chicherin (1828–1904) addressed his fellow Russians in an 1857 essay “Contemporary Tasks of Russian Life.” Here, the essay is republished by permission of Yale University Press, with a Foreword by the translator Gary Hamburg.
Pierre de Boisguilbert: Prime Extracts and Some Correspondence: The first great exponent of liberal economics in France was Pierre de Boisguilbert (1646–1714). Here, Benoît Malbranque provides English-language readers with a taste of Boisguilbert, and for the first time.
SSRN and medRxiv Censor Counter-narrative Science: Jay Bhattacharya and Steve Hanke detail the experience of three research teams being censored by SSRN and medRxiv. The article also points to a website (link) where scholars can report their experiences of being censored by SSRN, medRxiv, or other preprint servers.
Journal of Accounting Research’s Report on Its Own Research-Misconduct Investigation of an Article It Published: Dan Klein reports and rebukes the journal.
What are your most underappreciated works? Previously, 18 scholars with 4k+ Google Scholar cites pointed to a decade-or-more old paper with cite count below his or her h-index. Now, they are joined by Andrew Gelman, Robert Kaestner, Robert A. Lawson, George Selgin, Ilya Somin, and Alex Tabarrok.
EJW Audio:
Edwin van de Haar on Classical Liberalism in the Netherlands
Paul Robinson on Russian Liberalism
Vlad Tarko and Radu Nechita on Liberalism in Romania, 1829 to 2023