I've been talking about examples of the technical category of public goods and services, and have moved to relatively abstract ones. At this point I'd like to take some time to discuss fiat money as a public service ( Read more... )

May account of David Ricardo's model comparative advantage in production as a cause of trade is almost surely the most arithmetic-y I'll make for #2017econ . And likely you didn't want to bother to work your way through them, if you weren't already familiar with them ( Read more... )

And now I reveal that I've been quietly putting something past my readers, in talking about markets as an exchange technology. Without mentioning it (much) I have been talking about spot markets ( Read more... )

For this last lap of discussing the foundations of how economists reason about choice, I'll be talking about social technologies for exchange: individual pairwise exchange, markets, contracts, and firms ( Read more... )