Photo by Rohan Dixit on UnsplashAs regular readers of this blog know, I’m pretty ambivalent about trade barriers as an economic policy. On one hand I think targeted tariffs and other trade barriers can be used to protect strategic industrie
For many years, I was a big proponent of the idea that increased market power was harming the U.S. economy in various ways. In the 2010s, in the economics world, circumstantial evidence began piling up that implicated increased industrial c
So, Anthropic is going to IPO! The company is valued at almost $1 trillion, so this is going to be one of the biggest IPOs in history — the only other competitor being SpaceX, which is also set to go public soon. It’ll be one of the largest
Photo by Humane Society via Wikimedia CommonsI consider myself a pretty good and decent guy, overall. I don’t commit crimes. I’m nice to the people I meet. I help out my friends. I take good care of my pet rabbit, and I donate lots of money
Back when I started blogging in 2011, I saw my main function as technocratic — I would discuss policy ideas with other intellectual econ types, and wise policymakers at the Fed, in Congress, or in the Obama administration might put those id
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — David HumeIf you’re of a certain generation,1 you’ve probably seen the movie Office Space. If you haven’t,
Photo by Tim Mossholder on UnsplashI get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive govern
Photo by Alice Pasqual on UnsplashThere is a pernicious and persistent pattern among many partisan pundits and politicians, pertaining to public debt. When their own party is in power, they minimize or ignore the problem, but as soon as the
Photo by NASA via Wikimedia CommonsI waited too long to do this roundup, and the amount of interesting stuff built up to truly vast proportions. So let’s get right to it.1. Crime is down!I often get annoyed with people who trumpet falling c
Drone warfare has been a fascination of mine for a very long time. When I read Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” as a kid, I imagined what would happen if the attacking swarms were mechanical birds, controlled with AI. When I read about Japan
Photo by Instant Vantage, CC BY-SA 2.0Well this is a strange thing to write about on an economics blog, isn’t it? When I started this blog, I made a deal with myself that I’d write about whatever I felt like writing about, even if it doesn’
Photo by Lawrence Krowdeed on UnsplashWhich society is a better place to live: the U.S., or Europe? This is a very difficult question, for several reasons. For one thing, “Europe” can mean several different things — it can mean the richest
Photo by Jackson Simmer on UnsplashDonald Trump is headed to China with a whole bunch of top U.S. CEOs in tow to talk about trade. There is probably a post to be written here about how Trump is creating a new kind of “America, Inc.” centere
Photo by the Kremlin via Wikimedia.org“And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence.” — Enoch Root“In human life it's also true/ The strong will try to conquer you/ And that is what you must expect/ Unless y
Cartoon by Joseph Keppler via Wikimedia CommonsA few days ago I wrote a post about why Democrats can’t build a welfare state by taxing only billionaires:I wrote:Once upon a time, class politics pitted the middle class and poor against the u
Photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia CommonsI sat down today to write a post about how Barack Obama was a good President, and then I remembered that I already wrote it, back in 2022:What’s funny is that back in 2022, I was aiming my defense of
Source: Jesús Fernández-VillaverdeThe above image is from a recent tweet by University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (henceforth referred to as “JFV”), in which he criticizes the field of development economics for ign
Something big happened in the world of AI the other day: Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI, and probably the person who’s most commonly regarded as the face of the industry, declared that the purpose of AI is not to take people’s jobs:A
If I were a conservative, I’d argue against California’s proposed one-time 5% “billionaire tax” on the grounds that it would reduce the incentive for billionaires to invest and create jobs. I’d argue that in order to guard and support the e
Hi, folks! My father unfortunately passed away two weeks ago from chemotherapy complications, and as you can imagine, I’ve been busy dealing with that, so posting has been a bit light. My apologies. (I will probably write something about my