Creative Commons
Blogs I Follow
Category Archives: Economics
Follow the money
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Economics, Law, Politics, Questions Rarely Asked
Leave a comment
The Empirical Economics Debate
In the 1930s and 1940s, academic economists were engaged in the so-called “socialist calculation debate,” a theoretical quarrel that was not fully resolved until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. (Until then, some economists seriously believed that a … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Economics, History, Questions Rarely Asked
3 Comments
Simple Rules (United Airlines edition)
We are big fans of Richard Epstein’s book Simple Rules for a Complex World (Harvard University Press, 1995) for many reasons. Consider aviation. In place of this convoluted academic analysis, we would advocate for the following simple rule: carriers may … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Law
Leave a comment
How much is Tom Brady’s jersey really worth?
Half a mil or $119.99? That is, should the value of Tom Brady’s stolen Super Bowl LI jersey be its replacement value, i.e. what it would cost his team to buy him a new #12 jersey ($119.99, plus tax, according to the … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Economics, Law, Probability
Leave a comment
Markets and morality (final post, for now)
Note: This is the last installment of our series of blog posts reviewing Nathan B. Oman’s new book The Dignity of Commerce. Nate Oman concludes his beautiful book on The Dignity of the Commerce by drawing a fundamental distinction between … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Ethics, Law
Leave a comment
Exit, voice, and boilerplate
Note: This is the fifth of six blog posts on Nate Oman’s new book The Dignity of Commerce: Markets and the Moral Foundation of Contract Law. Now that we have surveyed Professor Oman’s chapter on contract remedies (see our 3/21 … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Ethics, Law, Literature
Leave a comment
Self-correcting contracts?
Note: This is the fourth of six blog posts in which we review Nate Oman’s new book The Dignity of Commerce: Markets and the Moral Foundation of Contract Law. After tackling the legal doctrine of consideration in Chapter 5 (see … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Ethics, Law, Literature, Philosophy
1 Comment
Class No. 9 (meet the interns)
Welcome back from Spring Break! For our next class, we’re going to go back in time, back to the summer of ’04. That’s when Mark Zuckerberg relocated his new company to Northern California and brought along Facebook’s first two interns, … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Ethics, Law
Leave a comment
The superfluous legal doctrine of consideration?
Note: This is the third of a series of blog posts in which we review Nate Oman’s new book The Dignity of Commerce: Markets and the Moral Foundation of Contract Law. As we mentioned in a previous post, Part I … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Ethics, Law, Literature
2 Comments
Morality distribution channels
Note: This is the second of several blog posts in which we review The Dignity of Commerce: Markets and the Moral Foundation of Contract Law, by Nathan B. Oman. In our previous post, we introduced Nate Oman’s book on “The … Continue reading
prior probability 