Maui and Montana Ramona and I just returned from an academic meeting in Maui.  We found new confirmation that economics is really a sub-set of behavioral ecology (or evolutionary biology if you prefer).  Here’s an example.  After an all night flight, we awoke at our ranch this morning with 3″ of snow and a large […]

In the now classic The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965) the author Mancur Olson wrote: “(O)nly a separate and ‘selective’ incentive will stimulate a rational individual in a latent group to act in a group-oriented way”; that is, members of a large group will not act in the […]

Milton Friedman is one of my all time favorite economists, Tom Schelling another.  Both won Nobel prizes and each contributed greatly to my understanding of how the world works.  I knew Milton and Rose longer but Tom and Alice much better.  While we live geographically far apart and the Friedman’s are gone, the Schelling’s remain […]

A version of this article appeared February 21, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Perverse Incentives of the Lawyers Guild. While law school enrollment drops, ABA rules bust the budgets. Law schools are in trouble. Applications are down almost 50% to an estimated 54,000 this […]