Austan Goolsbee and Peter Klenow compared overall inflation (red line) with inflation for goods that are sold online. They controlled for the fact that many goods like housing and fresh produce cannot be easily delivered by online vendors by matching…
I talk about some of history’s horrible famines in my economic development classes and the difficulty of getting enough food in Malthusian societies. Sometimes, some of my students ask why people starved rather than going out to hunt for food.…
Most Americans are used to low-density towns and suburbs and like them a lot. Many Americans have experienced unpleasant high-population-density places in America. In fact most of the high-density urban areas in the US were relatively unpleasant in recent US…
Unfortunately FRED has four different somewhat-overlapping data series that must be combined to get the full, long-run picture of the unemployment rate from 1929 to the present. The first data series in light green is undoubtably the least accurate of…
Data USA is a great place to access data for people who are thinking about where to go to college, what kind of major/career to investigate, and where to live after graduation. For example, my boys have been most interested…
In the Atlantic magazine, Rena Xu recently published an essay arguing that “electronic medical records and demanding regulations [are] contributing to a historic doctor shortage.” Although there are some grains of truth in the article, it completely misses the main…
David Glasner is a conservative economist who greatly admires Hayek and even thinks that Hayek’s macroeconomic theories have some merit even if they are weaker than many other theories. He is part of a small band of conservative economists that is…
