Mere Economics

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Latest — 14 Jul 2025

Bauer Brilliance

I regard the extension of the range of choice, that is, an increase in the range of effective alternatives open to people, as the principal objective and criterion of economic development; and I judge a measure principally by its probable effects on the range of alternatives open to individuals. From

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In This House, We Believe Demand Curves Slope Downward to the Right VIII

This series of posts is adapted from an essay originally published on my personal blog, A Fuller's Soap. During graduate school lecturing, a friend who I won’t name once joked, “We’ve covered downward sloping demand curves—what else is there to teach them?” Less flippantly, Armen

Easterly Economics

The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage of rights. The emphasis on the problem of expertise makes the problem of rights worse. The technical problems of the poor (and the absence of technical solutions for those problems) are

In This House, We Believe Demand Curves Slope Downward to the Right VII

This series of posts is adapted from an essay originally published on my personal blog, A Fuller's Soap. During graduate school lecturing, a friend who I won’t name once joked, “We’ve covered downward sloping demand curves—what else is there to teach them?” Less flippantly, Armen

Meanwhile, in Somewhere, USA...

Henry Hazlitt reminds us that: 💡In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special

Acton Advice

But it is not the popular movement, but the travelling of the minds of men who sit in the seat of Adam Smith that is really serious and worthy of attention. From Letters of Lord Acton to Lady Gladstone

Profits are Informative, Not Decisive

There are a lot of ways to make money that you probably shouldn’t pursue. Selling drugs to children, for example. Unfounded celebrity gossip. Pyramid schemes. Pornography. Economics can explain why these ventures are profitable, but it cannot determine whether these ventures are good. Similarly, physics can tell you what

In This House, We Believe Demand Curves Slope Downward to the Right VI

This series of posts is adapted from an essay originally published on my personal blog, A Fuller's Soap. During graduate school lecturing, a friend who I won’t name once joked, “We’ve covered downward sloping demand curves—what else is there to teach them?” Less flippantly, Armen

North Knowledge

Economic history is a depressing tale of miscalculation leading to famine, starvation, defeat in warfare, economic stagnation and decline, and indeed the disappearance of entire civilizations. From his Understanding the Process of Economic Change

In This House, We Believe Demand Curves Slope Downward to the Right V

This series of posts is adapted from an essay originally published on my personal blog, A Fuller's Soap. During graduate school lecturing, a friend who I won’t name once joked, “We’ve covered downward sloping demand curves—what else is there to teach them?” Less flippantly, Armen