All Posts Tagged With: "efficiency"

The Virtue of Market Inefficiency

A living economy needs to create inefficiencies, and lots of them, to set the stage for greater efficiency and ongoing innovation.

28Jun2011 | Sandy Ikeda | 5 comments | Continued

The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies

Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the evils of present-day society, they usually fail to understand either the root of those problems (government intervention) or their solution (the operation of a freed market). In Progressive commentary on energy, pollution, and so on—otherwise often quite insightful—calls for government intervention are quite common. [...]

22Oct2010 | Kevin A. Carson | 51 comments | Continued

Deflation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

During the current recession a number of commentators have made various comparisons to the Great Depression, mostly because of the dramatic decline in the stock market and ongoing troubles in the financial industry. When oil prices also began a dramatic decline in the autumn of 2008, pulling the overall consumer price level downward for the [...]

5Jan2010 | Steven Horwitz | 59 comments | Continued

Walmart’s Bottom Line

Walmart is one of the world’s largest, most successful, and most vilified corporations. It was ranked number four in the Fortune 500 from 1995 through 1998, reached number one in 2002 and stayed there until 2009, when it fell behind Exxon Mobil. It’s also the only firm in the top four of the Fortune 500 [...]

5Jan2010 | Art Carden | 19 comments | Continued

Misunderstanding Efficiency

Gary Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. Efficiency—getting the most value from a given amount of resources—is important in a world of scarcity. The more efficient people are, the better off they can make themselves. That’s why economists are always talking about efficiency. Unfortunately, what economists have to say on the subject [...]

1Mar2008 | Gary M. Galles | 2 comments | Continued

Separate the Professions and the State

Lewis Andrews (lew@yankeeinstitute.org) is executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy in Hartford, Connecticut. Since the early 1990s, and even through the collapse of the stock-market bubble, the American economy has continued to experience remarkable increases in worker productivity, both in manufacturing, which now accounts for 14 percent of the nation’s output, and [...]

1Dec2004 | Lewis M. Andrews | 0 comments | Continued

But what about . . . ?

My Virginia license plate, adorning both bumpers of my Japanese car, reads FRE TRDE. I always mention this to audiences so they know exactly where I stand on the question of how free consumers should be to spend their incomes on foreigners’ goods and services. I am proudly, completely, confidently, and unconditionally a free trader. [...]

1Sep2003 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | Continued

Government and Business Are the Same?

“Let us now praise slothful, inefficient, bloated government,” reads the opening of an April 30 Washington Post essay, “When the Blue Chips Are Down, in Gov We Trust.” “Let us now rejoice in the glory of your trillions of tax dollars at work.” Why are we rejoicing? Because staff writer Paul Farhi intends to show [...]

1Sep2002 | Scott McPherson | 0 comments | Continued

Leisure, The Basis of Culture

“How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!” —Lin Yutang1 Ever since moving to the Bahamas in 1984, I have been intrigued by the idea of leisure—shedding the workaholic rat race to be “free and easy” and “letting oneself go,” [...]

1Jan2002 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | Continued

Are People Pleased with the Efficient Amount of Pollution?

It is clear that zero pollution is not a reasonable goal once we recognize that polluting creates benefits as well as costs. Long before we reduced pollution to zero, there would be so much environmental quality and so few manufactured goods that the marginal value gained from increasing pollution would be greater than the marginal cost.

1Jun2001 | Dwight R. Lee | 1 comment | Continued

Fist of Steel

Dale DeBoer is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Last year was bad for U.S. steel producers. Imports jumped to historic highs, and domestic prices fell. Corporate steel profits collapsed, and almost six percent of steelworkers lost their jobs. Crying foul, steel producers appealed for relief under U.S. international [...]

1Nov1999 | Dale | 1 comment | Continued

Market-Share Sophisms

Christopher Mayer is a loan officer at a bank in Maryland and an MBA student at the University of Maryland. There are few more widely held fallacies than equating market share to power over consumers and competitors. That great companies maintain dominant positions in their markets is a red flag for regulators and anti-capitalist moralists, [...]

1Jun1999 | Christopher Mayer | 2 comments | Continued

The Twenty-First Century City

Books by politicians. Seldom worth reading and rarely even worthy of the appellation “book,” they are usually tedious pastiches of campaign blather, clichés, flattering photos, and anything else designed to help enhance election prospects. Don’t waste your time. But every now and then a politician writes a book that is not a waste of time, [...]

1Jul1998 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued

Should Profits Be Shared with Workers?

When most people argue that firms should share profits with workers, they are not interested in the general distribution of business receipts.[1] Rather, they are pointing to firms experiencing exceptionally high profits and claiming that fairness requires that most of those profits be passed on to workers. For example, management consultant Alfie Kohn states, If [...]

1Jun1997 | Dwight R. Lee | 5 comments | Continued

The Social Function of Mr. Henry Ford

Spencer Heath (1876-1963) was a pioneer in aviation manufacturing and the author of Citadel, Market and Altar: Emerging Society. His grandson Spencer Heath McCallum found this letter in the course of cataloguing his grandfather’s writings for the Institute for Humane Studies. Miss Thompson was a well-known journalist whose column, “On the Record,” appeared in the [...]

1Nov1996 | Spencer Heath | 1 comment | Continued

Building Code Blues

Mr. Saltzman teaches English at St. John’s School in Houston and volunteers as a policy analyst for the Houston Property Rights Association. “The authority of government,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.” But the city of Houston has a different view, [...]

1Jan1996 | James D. Saltzman | 2 comments | Continued

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