The news has spread quickly that Ronald Coase has passed away at the age of 102. The list of his fundamental contributions to human understanding runs long, as did his career. Just last year he published a book on capitalism in China (discussion here and here ). He is most famous for the “Coase Theorem,” which is fairly easy to grasp at a superficial level but is quite rich and nuanced at deeper levels. For this reason, the idea is often…
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Some noteworthy memorials have been published since my last post on memorials to Jim Buchanan . Perhaps most noteworthy are Geoff Brennan’s in Public Choice and Bob Tollison’s in the Southern Economic Journal . Links to both are gated, but most of the Brennan piece can be browsed free of charge. Both offer somewhat personal reflections. Geoff talks about Buchanan’s normative use of the word “optimal” — with reference to his own death — and how Buchanan wasn’t one to revise and keep coming back to prior works. Instead, he would just put it out…
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Our former professor, Charles K. Rowley , passed away this weekend after a long and prolific career as a scholar and teacher. Professor Rowley was a passionate teacher, as anyone who sat in his classroom will attest. He was also a deep scholar of public choice, and he worked tirelessly to shape the contours of the field, to advance those frontiers, and to stake claims to this work in the name of Virginia School scholars, particularly Jim Buchanan…
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Today I discovered a book the old fashioned way: while browsing the stacks at a brick-and-mortar library . Published in 2010, Better Living Through Economics is a collection of essays that documents the impact of basic economic research on improving public policies. The collection is edited by John J. Siegfried, who is Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University and the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Economic Association. All the contributors to the volume are top economists in the profession. Better Living has a…
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Probably the most common reaction to our book has been people’s curiosity about the title. Who are these “madmen” and “academic scribblers”? What do you mean by intellectuals? That’s why whenever we give a talk on the book, we use this slide to offer up some examples: “Intellectuals” are middlemen of ideas who influence (deliberately or not) the way large numbers of people view the world around them. These worldviews find their way into individual…
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Margaret Thatcher has died at the age of 87. The New York Times posts an obituary . The Guardian lists some of her most well-known quotations . The “Iron Lady” leads off Chapter 5 of  Madmen (“How Ideas Matter for Political Change”). We recount a story of Thatcher that we found in John Blundell’s writings. Thatcher is one of the revolutionaries discussed under the heading “Maggie, Mart, and the Madmen,” which are the opening words of Chapter 5: It happened with Lenin rousing the…
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Today’s NY Times has a book review of  Big, Hot, Cheap and Right : What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas, by Erica Greider. Since Ed and I are Texans, we think the state has a lot to offer. The NY Times review argues that this book has a lot to offer, too, including analysis of an evolving political economy. Such as this: I tend to look askance at an analysis that attributes a company’s or a…
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The IEA generously offered me the opportunity to contribute a blog post on the Guatemalan telecom reform. This is a slightly different introduction to the case study produced by the Antigua Forum, which Ed and I previously highlighted here . The IEA blog post provides a nice summary of the Guatemala experience, one of the most market-liberal telecom reforms in the world. Worry not, I will not be changing my regular blogging affiliations. Of course the IEA website is…
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I argued last time that an ideal measure of a think tank’s effectiveness would be its marginal effect on the marketplace of ideas. I also argued that, while conceptually simple, this ideal measure is impractical for a number of reasons. A simpler measure? A simpler measure would be funds raised through non-politicized (usually private) donations. This has the feel of a market test, in the sense that a donation indicates value created for the donor (otherwise, they…
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This year marks the 100th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s birth, so it’s not surprising that the 37th President of the United States has been in the press. This post argues that Nixon is interesting and relevant as a madman in authority — that is, as a political leader who was both brilliant and deeply flawed. His influence continues to permeate American politics. Recent additions to the Nixon genre focus relatively early in this politician’s career,…
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