Sublime

George Stigler, a thirty-five-year-old economist at the University of Minnesota. Inflation had diluted the 40-cent minimum wage, and people were calling for an increase to 60 or even 75 cents an hour, which translates to $9.51 and $11.88 in June 2022 dollars. “Economists have not been very outspoken on this type of legislation,” Stigler wrote. “It

Rather than the “labor theory of value,” I think about the “technology theory of value.” The actual value injection is from technology.

He had also been working out a new theory of economics that attempted to push back against the worst dehumanizing effects of industrialization.

Coming to the aid of consumers, these firms are using data-crunching to counteract the excesses of seller-side price extraction.

Taxes that fall more heavily on the poor than the rich, so-called regressive taxes, often offend our sense of justice.

Someone well versed in transaction cost economics and the realities of incomplete contracting might have predicted an outcome like this.

money is the market good with the least diminishing marginal utility.

We think it is a vicious interplay of three factors, each as unfortunate as the last, each feeding and fed by the others. First: physics envy. This is well understood and is not an original insight. Second, a more specific, material effect of physics envy in this realm: It pushes academic economists to search for what can be measured and quantified