Some Links

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Here’s a great new paper by my colleague Pete Boettke and GMU Econ PhD student Rosolino Candela.  Its title is “Price Theory as Prophylactic Against Popular Fallacies.”

In response to an e-mail that I received overnight from someone asking how I “tolerate the rich and their heirs getting richer whilst the rest of us merely scrape by,” I offer this graph from HumanProgress.org.

Ed Glaeser, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reviews Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth.  (gated)  A slice:

For instance, “Historical Statistics of the United States” tells us that a dollar in 1870 is worth a little less than $20 today. This implies that a person who earned $5,000 in 1870 could purchase about the same bundle of goods as someone who earns $100,000 today. But that’s nonsense. What person earning $100,000 today would trade places with someone earning even a generous wage 140 years ago? In 1870, there were no airplanes or cars or smartphones or air conditioners or microwave ovens. Medicine was awful. A large fraction of our daily expenses today couldn’t be bought in 1870 at any price, and thus inflation correction routinely introduces large errors into historical statistics.

I share Nick Gillespie’s lament that most Republican presidential candidates today are fiscally imprudent.

Here’s a long essay on Richard Posner.  (HT Tyler Cowen)

My colleague Thomas Stratmann and Matthew Baker (a GMU Econ PhD student) have a new study showing that certificate-of-need requirements have anti-competitive (and, hence, anti-conusmer) effects.

My Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy is rightly sour that Marco Rubio is sweet on protectionism.

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