economists
Government Regulation is the Pro-Market Solution
The Covid-19 pandemic has utterly discredited the false dichotomy of government vs. markets. Extensive government regulation is a prerequisite for the proper functioning of...
Capitalisn’t Is Back: Can Economists and Journalists Work Together to Improve Capitalism?
Is capitalism the engine of prosperity, or is it the engine of destruction? On this podcast, we talk about the ways capitalism is—or more...
Shareholders Don’t Always Want to Maximize Shareholder Value
Oliver Hart, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for economics, reflects on how the world has changed since Milton Friedman published his famous essay on the...
Serving Shareholders Doesn’t Mean Putting Profit Above All Else
The time has come for companies, economists, and society to abandon the argument that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits.
Editor’s note:...
Friedman’s Principle, 50 Years Later
In the mid-1980s, Milton Friedman’s view that the only social responsibility of business is to increase its profits became dominant in business and academia....
Emmanuel Farhi, Economist and Renaissance Man
Matteo Maggiori eulogizes Harvard economist Emmanuel Farhi, who passed away last month at the age of 41.
Emmanuel Farhi, one of the great minds...
Why Economic Predictions Are Useless Right Now
The Covid-19 crisis is unprecedented in its global scope and open-ended, uncontrollable progress. By their very nature, the models that economists often use to...
It Is Such a Small World: The Market-Design Academic Community Evolved in a Business Network
Private equity funds such as Michael Dell's MSD Capital made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the 2017 FCC spectrum auction, thanks...
How Market Design Economists Helped Engineer a Mass Privatization of Public Resources
In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission conducted a complex two-sided auction to reallocate spectrum from broadcasters to mobile communications companies. The way economists designed...
Indecent Proposals in Economics: The Moral Problem With Randomized Trial Experiments
The advent of field Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) has made it more acceptable for applied economists to collect data in developing countries. This raises...
