The Coasian Hell series were some of the most popular posts ever on this blog, and I’m quite proud of them, so how about a follow-up? One Coasian objection to the concept might be that the actors in the system can trade their way around to an efficient outcome through side-bargaining between them. This is…
Read More Coasian Hell: Back Into HellIn the acracy post I briefly touched on the apparently influential idea that there’s an economic calculus you can apply to COVID-19 – an inverse relationship between R and GDP growth. I didn’t really want to go into it much because I was writing about acracy rather than economics, so let’s get back to it.…
Read More The Hancock curveWhat to do while you’re living under two nations, in isolation? What about….blogging? We’re about at the time in the media life-cycle when you should expect takes arguing that panic-buying is actually good to appear, and indeed I see someone’s trying to rebrand it as “resilience buying”. Never mind. A lot of people think it’s…
Read More Keynes and the Case of the Disappearing BogrollsI have no idea if this is original, but I was thinking about the Keynesian theory of investment while doing something else and it occurred to me that you can explain it in terms of pre-funding or post-funding. The Modern Monetary Theory people think this distinction, applied to banks, has really important consequences for monetary…
Read More Pre-funding and post-funding investmentsAs a follow-up to this 8,000 pageview hellbeast, here’s an effort to dissect its central argument a bit more. I see maybe three points within it. First, there is an argument from transaction cost. This is simply that all those contracts need some lawyering. In itself this is probably the weakest of the three, and…
Read More A bit more on Coasian hellsA quick thought after this twitter conversation: Important point: if your product is information, your productivity is definitionally proportional to demand https://t.co/oulNUf2oNS — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) October 15, 2017 There is quite a large set of firms for which productivity is fundamentally demand-driven. This is a distinct point from Verdoorn’s law, the argument that productivity…
Read More Demand-determined productivityIt’s fairly well known that a lot of the productivity gap between the UK and other industrial countries is accounted for by a long tail of unusually unproductive small businesses (see ONS data here). This fascinating piece in the FT covers a project to do something about that by getting them management advice. An interesting…
Read More Where do UK SMEs get technology advice?I’ve been thinking a lot about scaling and the economics of the cloud recently after reading this. Specifically, this quote: The costs for most SaaS products tend to find economies of scale early. If you are just selling software, distribution is essentially free, and you can support millions of users after the initial development. But…
Read More Scale and scalabilityThe world is in turmoil. Trump. Brexit. Marine Le Pen. And as very often when this is so, it’s in turmoil about macro-economic policy although this is often less obvious than you might think. MLP, for example, wants to recreate the franc, redenominate the French national debt, presumably devalue/inflate a great chunk of it away,…
Read More An even simpler plan nobody wantsThis economic paper is strange: Over the past thirty years, a great deal of business cycle research has been based on purely real models that abstract from the presence of nominal rigidities, and so (at least implicitly) assume that the Phillips curve is vertical. In this paper, I show that such models are fragile, in…
Read More when the facts change…