Greater Yellowstone Policy Salon Series

This column is an exploratory essay and I welcome your suggestions.  I’m thinking of creating the Greater Yellowstone Policy Salon Series, an adventure in intellectual and policy entrepreneurship.  Let’s unpack this new idea and I hope influence change for the better.  There is a huge potential for policy reform in nearly every arena of American […]

Read More
 An Economist Who Made the Science Less Dismal

An Economist Who Made the Science Less Dismal

Armen Alchian never won a Nobel Prize in economics. But no less than Friedrich Hayek said he ‘deserved’ one. In 1975, I attended a week-long conference in Connecticut at which the star attraction was Friedrich Hayek. Hayek, who had shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, was doing a kind […]

Read More

The NRA and Theory of Concentrated Benefits

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 […]

Read More

The Simple Economics of Community Exploitation

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 […]

Read More

Perverse Incentives of the Lawyers Guild

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 […]

Read More

How Liberals Live

Introduced here by Dr. John Baden A Tale of Two Cities, Boulder and Bozeman First, an admission: I like Boulder, Colorado–as a place to visit and from which to learn. I’ve been there several times and always enjoyed my visits.  Many say Bozeman is like Boulder was 30 plus years ago.  They mean that as […]

Read More
 The Disenfranchisement of Rural America

The Disenfranchisement of Rural America

Anyone who pays even passing attention to American politics is familiar with the map (Figure 1) of the United States showing states in which a majority of voters favored President Obama (colored blue) and those where Romney garnered the most votes (in red). This map conveys three dominant messages: first, that states can be meaningfully […]

Read More
 “Competing for Elites”

“Competing for Elites”

This article reprinted from The American magazine, a publication of the American Enterprise Insitute. Web address: www.american.com The Swedish political Right has increasingly managed to recapture the support of a large segment of the chattering classes. There may be lessons for the United States. Ask most Europeans or coastal Americans: “Who are smarter, liberals or […]

Read More

“Is the Feds Game Worth the Candle?”

Introduced by Dr. John A. Baden, PhD Here is one great truth that has stuck with me since I was an undergraduate.  There is little disagreement among micro economists; their basic model is largely uncontested.  This field studies the behavior of individual households and firms in making decisions on the allocation of limited resources.  It examines markets and […]

Read More