The Grumpy Economist

Timothy Taylor, the Conversable Economist, tracks down the oft-told story of William Lee and his knitting machine . ...the 2019 World Deve...

In its death note to narrow banks  (link to  Federal Register  where you can post comments;  previous post ),  the Fed claimed charmingly th...

Suppose an entrepreneur came up with a plan for a financial institution that is completely safe -- it can never fail, it can never suffer a ...

People really do not need health insurance for regular small expenses, as they do not need car insurance to "pay for" oil changes....

In the aftermath of 9/11, there was some debate whether TSA should be federal employees, or run privately, and paid for by airlines. Governm...

An interesting question emerged from some discussion surrounding my last carbon tax post. How big will the tax be? The letter says $40 a to...

The Federal Government seems to be obeying with rather remarkable accuracy the constitutional mandate that the government may not spend mone...

The " Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends " in the Wall Street Journal this week is a remarkable document. It's short, s...

An essay at The Hill  on what to make of market volatility, from Dec 31. Now that two weeks have passed, I can post the whole thing. I add s...

How much is the property tax? In Calfornia, we pay 1%  per year. That doesn't seem bad, except that property values are very high. You...

As you may have noticed, I try very hard not to get in to the business of rebutting Paul Krugman's various outrages. The article " ...

George Selgin has a nice piece on TNB and IOER, which I missed when it came out in September, but it's still relevant. (HT a correspo...

Many of us free-market types bemoan how poorly designed regulation hurts economic growth. But unlike "stimulus," regulation is a d...

An essay at The Hill on what to make of market volatility: What’s causing the big drop in the stock market, and the bout of enormous volat...

Scott Sumner has a terrific post on teaching economics . (HT Marginal Revolution) The core ideas of economics are extremely counterintuiti...

Christopher Rufo at the New York Post has an interesting article on homeless problems in Seattle. The analysis rings true of many other are...

A  WSJ oped  with J J Plecs, formerly of  Roam Analytics , which does a lot of health related data work. This is the full oped now that 30 d...

Over the last few weeks we have had a series of discussions at Hoover on the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis and recession. Th...