Bozeman consistently ranks high among American towns. Unless one is allergic to cold, committed to scuba diving, or loves big cities, Bozeman is wonderful. Cultural and natural beauty abound, while considerate behavior and civility are normal, not aberrations. Community involvement with music and the arts is exceptionally high; consider support for the Bozeman Symphony, Intermountain […]
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It was a treat to see Jane Goodall during her recent visit to Bozeman. Dr. Goodall’s path-breaking research with chimpanzees was done on the Gombe Stream Reserve, now a small national park in western Tanzania. Dr. Goodall told her Bozeman audience that the park (and its chimpanzees) face serious threats as local residents clear the […]
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Trust is a precious and often underappreciated quality in political, personal, and business relations. Trust fosters productive exchange and minimizes the burdens of cooperation. When trust is high, monitoring costs are low, surely a good thing, for when handshakes suffice, formal contracts are redundant. Trust fosters long-term success. Consider Owenhouse, perhaps America’s best hardware store, […]
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The faculty of Montana State University, by far the most visible and significant employer in our area, is considering a vote to unionize. I’ve been asked two probing questions. First, why would professors, generally “liberals” and among the most fortunate individuals in Montana, organize to extract more money from citizens of one of the poorest […]
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Here’s some good news worth sharing. It’s from a paper by Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer. “The last quarter century has witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. The world’s per capita inflation-adjusted income rose from $5,400 in 1980 to $8,500 in 2005. Schooling and life expectancy grew rapidly, while infant mortality and poverty fell just as fast. […]
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“Stimulus: something that incites or rouses to action; an incentive.” Last week Congress approved a $168 billion economic stimulus package to help our slowing economy. One hundred and sixty-eight BILLION dollars—a staggering amount to most of us, but only a drop in the bucket of our $14 trillion dollar economy. At first glance, the bill […]
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Two thirds of the world’s poorest countries are in Africa. It’s home to 34 of the 35 states with the lowest life expectancy. More than 300 million people survive there on less than a dollar a day. (This figure has gone up by around 100 million over the last 10 years.) All this despite the […]
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Many smart and well-intentioned people fault government for its injustices and inefficiencies. Because there are few incentives to economize, and many to mislead, waste and moral corruption are endemic to and inherent in political management. No nation has found a way in practice, or in principle, to foster efficiency and equity when decisions are make […]
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If you had a label, where would you be made? I would be “Made in Valencia” or “Made in California,” or, if we took a broader perspective, I could have one of those little flag logos on my sticker and it would say “Made in the USA.” But would either of these identifiers tell the […]
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Three Americans shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.” They owe an intellectual debt to Friedrich Hayek. His 1945 American Economic Review article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” focused on the distribution of knowledge and the difficulty of coordinating behavior from a central location. While […]
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