I [originally called] this LJ Thinking Out Aloud because it is a way of exploring and grappling with issues. So, continuing on from this post, profit and loss can be looked at usefully from the basis of the theory of the firm. The Coasian analysis of the boundary of the firm being set by the relative transaction costs of doing things within the ( Read more... )

On Monday, was at Terang Secondary College, a small (370 kids) public school in a Western District town past Colac, doing a combined session of Arms & Armour out under some trees and then two sessions of Heraldry. The kids were lovely. Indeed, it was very noticeable how polite and friendly they were, just interacting with them at recess and ( Read more... )

You draw the graph for (perfectly) Inelastic as a big I ( Read more... )

While I am a tad critical at times of modern academe, it is also true that there is a great deal of enlightening scholarship being produced. Not all of which is, alas, terribly accessible.

Avner Greif’s Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade is a striking, but often rather densely theoretical, attempt to ( Read more... )

Pictures from 1984 North Korea. One the great lies of Leninism was that it abolished private property in the means of production: it just turned the state and all it controlled into the property of the ruling group. In North Korea, the Kim dynasty effectively owns the people tooNo system abolishes property rights, they merely re-assign them or ( Read more... )

Here’s an historical puzzle. Slaves cannot own property, they are property. Yet slaves did, on occasion, buy their own freedom. How can someone not legally entitled to own anything assemble enough wealth to buy their own freedom ( Read more... )

Talking to sjkasabi about getting across economics for her public policy Masters, I argued that a survey course in microeconomics was better value than one on macroeconomics (a less well developed and more ad hoc area of economics).

Which led on to the question of what books in my library would be useful introductory texts. Unfortunately my copy of ( Read more... )

Oliver E Williamson is one of the pioneers of modern institutional economics, which works on the notion that transactions are the basic unit for economic analysis and that transaction costs are basic for understanding patterns in economic life. It is an approach I find congenial and informative. His Mechanisms of Governance is a compilation of ( Read more... )

Had the unusual experience today (Thursday) of reading an Op.Ed. by John Quiggin where I agreed with every word.

It was a piece in the AFR criticising the Government’s proposed new media policy, arguing for a much more open system including auctioning off the spectrum to determine its real market value and use and encouraging much more media ( Read more... )

Modern global economic history generates two great puzzles. First, why and how did the NW Europe and Anglo-America achieve such unparallelled economic take-off (and why was Japan the non-Western society who was most easily able to emulate, and some ways surpass, that achievement)? Second, was the Industrial Revolution the crucial change and why ( Read more... )