Economic Logic

When we think about a social planner that maximizes welfare by assigning optimal allocations without an explicit price system, we are really...

Social mobility has been much studied to understand how the poor have a shot at becoming rich and how the rich manage to preserve their stat...

Isn't it interesting that most human societies, even when not in contact with each other, evolved to a model with long-term monogamous f...

Despite the fact that it happened about 200 years ago, we are still puzzling why the Industrial Revolution happened, why it started in Brita...

I generally find debates about schools of economic thought annoying, especially when it is all about adoration of some dead economist while ...

The social fabric of a country has a lot of inertia. It takes generations for norms to change, in large part because people rarely change du...

Early in the 20th century, the United States took over from the United Kingdom the role of the preeminent economic and political power. Sinc...

I tend to think that financial management, and especially risk management, are modern creations that came about after the introduction of an...

Cannibalism within most animal species arises only in extreme circumstances. It is not clear to me why this is less prevalent than intra-spe...

71 years today, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and opened a new front in its global war. Why would a relatively small country take on a much la...

There is no doubt that average human lifetimes have considerably lengthened since Antiquity (except, maybe, Biblical times...). Improvements...

There is a large variety of institutions and cultures around the world, and I find it fascinating to understand how they originated. The lit...

With the European sovereign debt crisis continuing to linger with the frustrating hesitation waltz of the politicians, it may be a good idea...

Family feuds can be terrible, and divorce is the worst. That may be because people who trusted each other find themselves victims of treason...

Many scientists dream of finding a unified theory of something, a theory that would encompass others and explain, with a few equations, a la...

For better or worse, union are particularly weak in the United States. This was not always so. Why unions declined is not limited to Reagani...

Small countries are often considered a nuisance. They are sometimes tax havens that annoy larger countries because it increases tax competit...

A standard model with a production function concave in labor will tell you that the marginal productivity of labor, and hence the real wage,...

Universities can have a profound impact on the economy of a region, Silicon Valley being a prime recent example. But this is usually difficu...

Some say that the western economies are doomed and that China is taking over as the main economic power. I do not think we are quite there y...