All Posts Tagged With: "market failure"
Some Sins of Textbook Economics
People who are ignorant of economics are susceptible to all sorts of misunderstandings. Fortunately knowledge of even just the basics of sound economics is a powerful inoculant against many dangerous falsehoods and half-truths. This fact, however, does not imply that exposure to more economics is necessarily good. The sad reality is that economists too often [...]
4Jan2012 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 12 comments | ContinuedThe Failure of Market Failure
Which process has better built-in mechanisms to provide the knowledge and incentives necessary to notice imperfections and improve on them?
8Dec2011 | Steven Horwitz | 41 comments | ContinuedDangerous Political Naifs
Being well past the age of 50 and having spent nearly all my adult life as an academic economist, I seize the privilege of doing what so many other economists of my age and rank do—namely, offer unsolicited speculations about what is right and what is wrong with modern economics. First, something that is right. [...]
26Oct2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 10 comments | ContinuedEconomic Analysis and the Great Society
Although the Great Society should be understood as primarily a political phenomenon—a vast conglomeration of government policies and actions based on political stances and objectives—economists and economic analysis played important supporting roles in the overall drama. Even when political actors could not have cared less about economic analysis, they were usually at pains to cloak [...]
25May2011 | Robert Higgs | 5 comments | ContinuedGetting it Right or Knowing You Got it Wrong?
It’s not just that government gets it wrong at various points but that political processes do not have the same error detection and correction abilities that markets do.
31Mar2011 | Steven Horwitz | 18 comments | ContinuedIs the Decline of Newspapers a Market Failure?
Over the past year there has been a flurry of government-related activity aimed at stopping the decline of the newspaper business. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has held three series of workshops on the subject, drawing dozens of top academics, national politicians, business leaders from companies like Google and News Corporation, and the FTC commissioners [...]
22Sep2010 | Edward J. López | 6 comments | ContinuedWhat Does the Oil Spill Prove?
You’ve got to hand it to the people who dislike free markets. They see them everywhere, especially wherever any serious problem arises. That no free market exists within a thousand miles makes no difference whatsoever. Take the oil spill in the Gulf. Market opponents are having a field day. They say this finally demonstrates the [...]
25Aug2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedA Free-Market Energy Vision
Energy is the master resource. Without it other resources could not be produced or consumed. Even energy requires energy: There would not be usable oil, gas, or coal without the energy to manufacture and power the requisite tools and machinery. Nor would there be wind turbines or solar panels, which are monuments to embedded fossil-fuel [...]
29Jun2010 | Robert L. Bradley Jr. | 5 comments | ContinuedIs the Decline of Newspapers a Market Failure?
Old journalism is failing not because it is a public good that government has not adequately funded but because it is being replaced with more innovative alternatives.
29Jun2010 | Edward J. López | 14 comments | ContinuedFixing Global Warming for Fun If Not Profit
Amateur global-warming skeptics can make me uncomfortable.
4Jun2010 | Sheldon Richman | 27 comments | ContinuedFederal Deposit Insurance: A Banking System Built on Sand
Federal deposit insurance grew out of a turbulent time in American history: the Great Depression. During two waves of bank failures in the 1930s an astonishing 9,000 banks closed and millions of depositors lost some or all of their savings. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) began operations in 1934, insuring deposit accounts up to [...]
20May2010 | Warren C. Gibson | 11 comments | ContinuedFair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development
Joseph Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University. He served as a member and then chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1997, and then was the chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. In 2001 Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel [...]
18May2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Free Market Is Failing?
There is no doubt the U.S. economy has hit a rough patch over the last several months. As is often the case when economic problems make headlines, pundits rush to declare that capitalism is “in trouble,” or “is ailing” or even “has failed.” This reaction to economic bad news is as old as capitalism itself. [...]
1Dec2008 | Steven Horwitz | 6 comments | ContinuedMisunderstanding 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 | ContinuedUneven Information Causes Market Failure?
In a famous 1970 paper, economics Nobel Laureate George Akerlof used the market for used cars to show how differences in information between buyers and sellers (“asymmetric information”) could lead a market to shrink or collapse entirely. A large variety of markets have been said to fail because of asymmetric information, from all different types [...]
1Dec2007 | Joshua C. Hall | 0 comments | ContinuedOn Misplaced Concreteness in Social Theory
The following piece will not be as abstruse as its title suggests. Rather, it results from the simple observation that, time and time again, some harmful outcome or process commonly attributed to the everyday workings of the market economy actually does exist, but it exists in the realm of the government and politics. Politicians and [...]
1May2006 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 0 comments | Continued-
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