As I read the bitcoin news each day and see the price of bitcoin cycling up and down, I’ve been thinking about the different sides of the blockchain scaling debate, and wondering what the best solution is for miners. While I realize that many of us signal (via our pool) our support of one proposal … Continue reading A Bitcoin Miner’s Case for a Variable Blocksize
Category: Economy
A recent article pointed out that Spiders could theoretically eat every human on Earth in one year. Shocking. It’s also shocking that governments can theoretically destroy all wealth in one year. Governments are quite literally all around us, even governments within governments. There is one in your town, one in your home, one in your … Continue reading Governments Can Theoretically Destroy All Wealth in the World in One Year
Funny thing about American manufacturing: The good news about what’s happening at American factories often sounds like bad news to politicians. American factories are one of the wonders of the world, and, in spite of what President Donald Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders, and other lightly informed populists claim, they are humming. U.S. manufacturing output is … Continue reading The Purpose of Manufacturing Isn’t to Create Jobs
The ongoing battle over gender equality has turned the question of the relative pay of women and men into quite the political football. Over the last few years, defenders of markets, including me, have been on the offensive, arguing that the gender pay gap is in some sense a “myth.” More recently, critics have replied … Continue reading Truth and Myth on the Gender Pay Gap
Try to think of a country that elected a populist president: someone who wanted to boost manufacturing jobs, insists that domestically-sold products should be made domestically, and threatens to use tariffs to shut off foreign competition. How would that work out? I am, of course, referring to President Cristina Kirchner of Argentina, not President Donald … Continue reading Argentina Already Tried Trumponomics
CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said on Friday he has asked the United Nations to help the South American nation alleviate medicine shortages, which have become increasingly severe as the oil-producing nation's economic crisis accelerates. Triple digit inflation and a decaying socialist economic model have left medications ranging from simple anti-inflammatory drugs to … Continue reading Venezuela’s Maduro asks UN to help ease medicine shortages
In the Republican debate last week, CNN’s Dana Bash pressed the candidates on how they would deal with Social Security. Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz gave solid answers, explaining that the system was headed toward insolvency, suggesting ways to slow spending growth, and scolding candidates who denied the need for cost-saving reforms. One of the … Continue reading Flashback: Donald Is in Denial about Social Security
As someone who works around a lot of economists in Washington, DC, I am privy to a lot of big talk about the problem of retirement policy. The overwhelming consensus among the learned is that Americans, as a group, aren’t saving enough money for retirement, and that if we can gather sufficiently clever people in … Continue reading Retirement Is Nobody’s Business but Your Own
Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) have just introduced a bill that would implement an idea that I have long championed: making drugs, devices, and biologics that are approved in other developed countries also approved for sale in the United States. Highlights of the “Reciprocity Ensures Streamlined Use of Lifesaving Treatments Act (S. 2388), or … Continue reading One Bill Could Massively Improve Access to Lifesaving Drugs
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to spend twice as much on infrastructure as whatever Hillary Clinton was proposing, which at the time was $275 billion. Doubling down again in a speech after winning the election, Trump now proposes to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure over the next ten years. President Obama had … Continue reading Why One-Size-Fits-All Infrastructure Spending Doesn’t Work
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