Property Rights: Necessary but Not Sufficient for Prosperity

At e3ne.org, I have posted some reflections on my last discussion with the Ethics & Economics Challenge students, on the topic of private property rights. The work of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson on how property rights support high levels of development plays a prominent role. Here's a scatter plot from their famous 2001 paper: Economies …

Chavismo and the Economy

Back before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were plenty of examples of what happens once the price mechanism is suspended and decisions regarding resource allocations are assigned to the state. Fortunately, Venezuela provides us with some modern day examples. Here are a few quotes from an interesting piece by William Neuman in the …

Briefly Noted

Libertarianism.org - Finally! A non-technical, one-stop shop for the major ideas in the philosophical tradition of liberty. Cato Institute project. Governance Without a State: Policies and Politics in Areas of Limited Statehood (Columbia UP) - File under "order in anarchy." Mostly European scholars giving somewhat different takes than you get with the UK-US "economics of …

Stability, Peace, and Poverty

The last issue of The Economist has a feature on "middle-income fragile and failed states" (MIFFs). It compares the World Bank list of countries by development level (high, middle, and low) to the OECD list of "fragile and failed states," finding that fragile and failed states are by no means exclusively low-income: [S]ome 15 of …