As the debate over federal lands continues, those who are jockeying over who controls the land often assume that their own preferred use of the land is the “correct” use of the land. Environmentalists hold that without federal control of land, all lands would be sold off to miners and ranchers who will strip and graze the land into dust.
The government believes that the price of a definite commodity, e.g., milk, is too high. It wants to make it possible for the poor to give their children more milk. Thus it resorts to a price ceiling and fixes the price of milk at a lower rate than that prevailing on the free market. The result is that the marginal producers of milk, those producing at the highest cost, now incur losses.
Ever since the first computer game was introduced in 1962, video games have had an ever-expanding role and impact on society. In 2004, video games started earning more than Hollywood’s domestic box offices. With this expansion of the industry new kinds of games have started to emerge.
The literature on market imperfection and market failure is voluminous, ever-growing, and filled with Nobel laureates. Identify a new source or instance of market “failure,” and you’re likely to win a Nobel Prize, or so it seems.
After many years of Mises University, Fellowships, the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, and our Scholars Conferences, thousands of students have become Mises Institute alums. We know that many of you have gone on to have quite impressive careers in economics, business, medicine, the physical sciences, and other fields, too. You’ve written books, made movies, invented things, educated others, and done a lot to change the world for the better.
In a few recent articles, The Economist has tackled the issue of economic predictions and forecasts: how to make them more accurate, timely, and reliable, or how to nowcast rather than forecast. Amidst more accolades for data series and newfangled statistical measures, an interesting point resulted from their investigation: the failure of all economic predictions—especially of government forecasting—to intuit a coming recession.
As part of their efforts to force federal intervention in Colorado to overturn local legalization of marijuana, the Republican attorneys general of Oklahoma and Nebraska have now taken to describing the State of Colorado as a “drug cartel”:
As I noted last month, once the oil price hit $40 per barrel, it was already below a ten-year low when adjusted for inflation. While still above the very-low prices of the 1990s in real terms, the oil price is in the midst of its biggest collapse since 2009. In real dollars, here’s the oil price at $40:
