Coase

That is the title of my Mercatus working paper (PDF), released yesterday. Basically, it aims to be a short course in public economics for tech policy analysts. Almost all policy wonks have taken Econ 101, perhaps even a graduate version, in which they learn…

Karl Smith playfully suggests that it is ironic that Steve Jobs has so many fans among Austrian economists:

Apple was principally the complete opposite of…

Twitter spam is a frequent occurrence, and I typically ignore it, but not today. This morning I received this message from an account that has been spamming people for several days. I did my duty and reported the account for spam and…nothing.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed last week that I have an app in the new Mac App Store. It’s called Gmail Dock, you can find more info about it here and here, and you can buy it here.

This Black Friday, I had the occasion to ponder why it is that Apple offers free engraving on iPods and iPads (hereafter, iP*ds). A small part of the reason is surely that it adds value for some of its customers. But assuming that the cost of engraving is not zero…

I am told that there will be an election next week. Actually nobody told me; it’s what I gathered from the yard signs. Elections, for me, are a spectator sport. I will probably be up all night watching the Prop 19 returns come in, but I haven’t participated since Bryan Caplan showed me the…

Welcome to the third installment in our series of discussions of the Most Insightful Articles in economics. Today we are discussing Ken Arrows’s 1950 article A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare.

Welcome to the first installment of our series of discussions of the Most Insightful Articles in economics. Today we are discussing Ronald Coase’s 1937 article The Nature of the Firm.

Ronald Coase wrote only a handful of academic journal articles — -nearly every…