Via Reihan Salam, here’s a bit from Greg Mankiw: one reason that people differ in their incomes is that some people care more about having a high income than others… Bryan [Caplan] goes on to suggest that to the extent this is true, it weakens the case for income redistribution. He is absolutely right. Most …
This is a bit outside the normal scope of the blog, but I’ve been shocked to see the point not be made elsewhere. You may have seen the excellent NYT article from a couple weeks back “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work.” It’s a terrific piece of journalism but with one major error. …
I try to avoid politics here on the blog, even though it’s something I read about and talk about quite a bit. But there’s a point about inequality that I’ve been startled to see conservatives either missing or ignoring. In the clip above, Rich Lowry makes what I believe is a very misguided statement, arguing …
I have a review of Yochai Benkler’s new book up at The Atlantic today. Here’s the gist: Benkler had described and classified the possible motivations driving Wikipedians in his 2006 tome The Wealth of Networks, in which he analyzed the Internet’s impact on the economics of information. In his new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan, Benkler …