Category: Economics

Brad Plumer wrote an article yesterday trying to determine how much online piracy costs the economy. The Movie Picture Association of America claims it costs $20.5 billion per year. Other analyses of the cost — including one from the Government Accountability Office — call that figure absurd. But this debate is completely wrong from the… Continue reading Piracy really costs the economy nothing

Casey Mulligan blogs about economic issues for the New York Times. He is one of those supply-side economists cut from the University of Chicago cloth (both teaches there and received his Ph.D there). Like the famed Chicago boys, Mulligan almost always toes the simplistic supply-and-demand line, predicting from his armchair how people will behave based… Continue reading How would a “sensible” unemployed person act?

The Environmental Protection Agency released new regulations on mercury emissions this week. Predictably, the right-wing has been screaming about the extent to which these regulations will kill jobs. Many observers have already figured out that the right-wing has decided to just call anything it does not like job-killing whether it is true or not. But… Continue reading The rhetoric of job-killing has reached absurd levels

The Atlantic Cities ran an interesting piece today about corporate relocation battles. The short of it is that states compete with one another to bring in specific corporations by giving away huge sums of public money. Right now, Ohio and Illinois are fighting over the Sears corporate headquarters, with both states offering around $400 million… Continue reading Sears and the race to the bottom

The debates surrounding copyright and piracy generally bore me. Those engaged in the debates invariably analogize piracy and copyright infringement to either stealing or sharing, and then the debate goes nowhere from there. That vacuousness aside, the copyright system does seem out of touch with the modern world, and it is hard to see how… Continue reading The copyright system is broken