Author Archive | Tyler Cowen

Can you guess who? If nothing else, the opening message shows a great sense of humor. Update: This “blog” appears to be fraudulent, and not sponsored by Tribe himself. My apologies to Tribe and VC readers.

Here is the story.

Today’s New York Times reports on a recent study by Daniel Klein. Klein sampled over 1000 U.S. academics as to their party affiliations. Here are a few salient facts: 1. In the humanities and social sciences, Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one. 2. For nonacademic practitioners, the numbers are not nearly so […]

This week I will be guest-blogging over at the on-line Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com. The Journal page is usually gated, but for this week it is open to all visitors. I am debating economist John Irons of Argmax.com. The exchanges are on the Economy page; here is a direct link, which includes a comments board. […]

The New York Post, citing an unnamed inmate at the Alderson, W.Va., minimum-security prison camp for women, reported that the guru of good living spent some time last week picking crab apples from trees on the camp grounds and used them to cook up sweet jelly. “The normal person would get punished for that, but […]

I am sorry to report that Aaron Director recently passed away, after having achieved the distinction of being a centenarian. (He was born in the Ukraine in 1901.) Director was one of the most important economists of the twentieth century. He founded the Journal of Law and Economics, perhaps the most influential economics journal of […]

“The best thing that could happen to the environment is free-market capitalism. In a true free-market economy, you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. In a true free-market economy, you get efficiencies and efficiency means the elimination of waste. Waste is pollution. So in true free-market capitalism, […]

Surely you have heard by now that Bobby Fischer was arrested in Japan, for violating U.N. trade sanctions against Yugoslavia/Serbia in the early 1990s. Here is the most detailed scoop I have managed to find. Here is just one bit of this sad story: If the United States had been serious about keeping tabs on […]

For my law and literature class I would like to use an autobiography of a lawyer, judge, or other prominent legal figure. The standards are the following: 1) It must be well written and broadly literary, 2) It cannot be longer than four or five hundred pages, 3)It must be at least moderately entertaining to […]

The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Law, published by AEI, June 2004, the download is here, 42 pp.. Here is the summary: This monograph seeks to explain the expansion of intellectual property law over the last half century, focusing in particular on the rapid growth that began with the 1976 Copyright Act. In so doing, […]

About a week ago Jacob Levy asked whether he should vote libertarian for President, and concluded in the negative, at least for this time around. I have no qualms with Jacob’s points, but I will suggest an alternative option for thinking through the problem. 1. Your vote will not count, no matter what. If the […]

Would it have been so terrible if America had remained part of the British empire? Perhaps slavery would have ended sooner and WWI might have been avoided. Brad DeLong nonetheless endorses the Revolution: Remember that the political evolution of Britain toward democracy was not foreordained as of 1775. (Indeed, the pressure exerted by the example […]

Here are some old Presidential TV commercials, dating back to 1950. You can even view Ronald Reagan from 1964. Thanks to the ever-excellent Geekpress.com for the pointer.

The ever-insightful Randall Parker suggests that this may be the case. It is one of his “research projects” to think through what kind of children we will seek to genetically engineer, and what kind of world will then result.

We saw Control Room last night, overall I was underwhelmed. If you read the better blogs, you won’t learn much from this film. I did feel that the movie presented the so-called “American point of view” with relative fairness. The American communications officer spoke frequently, was portrayed sympathetically, and made many of the better points […]