Sheldon Richman writes, with his usual deep insight, about trade.
David Henderson celebrates “triangle man” Arnold Harberger’s 100th birthday. A slice:
If you’re wondering why I call him “Triangle Man,” check out this link. It’s a nice extensive and understandable treatment of Harberger’s classic 1954 article in the American Economic Review, “Monopoly and Resource Allocation.” Economists had been stating for decades that monopoly caused deadweight loss but he was the first to try to estimate the size of the deadweight loss. Harberger found that, for U.S. manufacturing, it was unlikely to be above 0.1 percent of GNP. (Gross National Product was the conventional measure of the size of an economy at the time.) There are, to be sure, various criticisms of his argument and estimate. The point is that he did it and no one before him had done so. The deadweight loss from monopoly is typically measured by a triangle. Thus the nickname, one which was used in various skits put on by University of Chicago students and one that he wore proudly.
Chelsea Follett reports on everyday life in 18th-century England.
Jack Nicastro and Samuel Crombie warn us to be wary of calls for government regulation of AI. A slice:
As Don Lavoie avers in National Economic Planning: What Is Left? (1985), central planning was “nothing more nor less than governmentally sanctioned moves by leaders of the major industries to insulate themselves from risk and the vicissitudes of market competition.”
Regulation is merely central planning’s less ambitious corollary: in the words of Lavoie, a means for the corporate elite “to use government power to protect their profits from the threat of rivals.” For more on Don Lavoie and an incisive analysis of his contributions to the Knowledge Problem, we refer the reader to Cory Massimino’s piece for EconLib.
A common objection to qualified immunity reform is that cops will be bankrupted by lawsuits without it. But a study conducted by UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz found that governments or their insurance companies, not the cops themselves, paid 99.98 percent of the damages awarded to plaintiffs. It’s hard to know if Trump realizes this is the case, as he promised in December to “indemnify [police] against any and all liability.” Whether that was a knowingly false promise or whether he is unfamiliar with the law remains unclear.
