Back before 1870, there’s no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake the economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can… Read More »Brad DeLong on Proudhon, property and coercion, and the Royal Society’s cornucopia
This excerpt is from DeLong’s interview on Conversations with Tyler. It’s a great discussion – highly recommended. COWEN: If we’re trying to think about the… Read More »Brad DeLong on technological growth and economic change 1870-2010
The proponents of this unrealistic scenario [of reduction in global demand for goods] allow merely a factor-of-two increase across all modes of mobility during the… Read More »Not long ago; or, Little by little (9): Car ownership in China 1999-2019
… the 20th century saw a nearly 40-fold gain in useful energy [i.e. energy available for human use]; since 1800 the gain was about 3,500-fold.… Read More »Technology (26): Vaclav Smil on available energy per capita since 1800
Hattip: Brink Lindsey Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight… Read More »Technology (24): Keynes on The Permanent Problem; or, The Dread of Abundance
Recommended. Abstract We show that any cross-national measure of human material wellbeing that is (i) basics (not luxuries),(ii) general (uses indicators from multiple domains), and(iii)… Read More »“Empirically sufficient and empirically necessary” – Lant Pritchett on economic growth as the (only) key to poverty reduction
From a nice piece on the Our World in Data blog, with some helpful data points, here. See also: Max Roser: defining global development Our… Read More »Three truths about global development and progress from Max Roser
I’ve never read anything by Lant Pritchett that wasn’t interesting, and this brief blog article is no exception. It’s a good reminder that “broad based… Read More »Lant Pritchett on Poverty, Economic Growth and Charity
A long extract from a good episode of the Tim Ferriss show – link below. The thing that I think is important to communicate is,… Read More »Patrick Collison on the hedonic treadmill and the struggles of building Stripe
Paul Romer: On growth, my number two on human capital would be to think about skills throughout the whole skill and income distribution, especially if… Read More »Paul Romer on literacy, dyslexia, inequality and the joy of reading