Author Archive
The Symbolic Uses of Politics
| Dick Langlois |
One of the most interesting law-and-economics scholars out there is Amitai Aviram at the University of Illinois, whom I met at a conference a few years ago. I only just discovered his recent work on what he calls bias arbitrage, “the extraction of private benefits through actions that identify and mitigate discrepancies between objective risks and the public’s perception of the same risks.” The idea is that people often misperceive the risks of various events. This creates an entrepreneurial opportunity for someone who can benefit from manipulating those misperceptions.
In some ways, this is an elaboration of Murray Jacob Edelman’s The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964). In Edelman’s story, the citizenry are worried about various large issues about which they have no control: the Russians, global warming, swine flu, or — Edelman’s example, as I recall — the threat of business monopolies. In most cases, these fears are exaggerated or have no basis at all in fact — like the fear of spontaneous monopolies. But politicians can advance themselves by taking symbolic steps to allay these fears — like passing the Sherman Antitrust Act. (As Tom DiLorenzo, Jack High, Tom Hazlett, and others have suggested, the Sherman Act was also about diverting attention away from the McKinley tariffs, which would indeed transfer income from consumers to producers.)
Aviram’s spin is that there can be a welfare-improving effect to this process, to the extent that, by changing people’s perceptions of the underlying risks, entrepreneurs can bring people’s assessments in line with the actual underlying risks and thus get people to behave more efficiently. One example he uses is security measures at airports. After 9/11, people overestimated the probability of highjackings and shifted away in droves from air travel and toward automobile travel, which is actually a less-safe alternative. By instituting the ceremony of airline security, the government might have persuaded people that the probability of highjackings went down — even though it probably didn’t go down and was already low anyway — and therefore got them to return to (safer) air travel, an efficient outcome even taking into account the costs of the ceremony. (If you don’t believe that the ceremonies of the Transportation Security Administration are purely symbolic — or even if you do — check out this interesting piece in the Atlantic Monthly a while back.) Aviram understands perfectly well that this process can also lead to bad outcomes: the much-discussed case of seatbelt laws making car travel less safe might be an example. Whether the placebo effect (as Aviram calls it) has good or bad effects is a case-by-case question. One might well wonder whether today, eight years almost since 9/11, it isn’t the case that airport security ceremonies actually serve to remind people of terrorist threats and therefore to raise their assessments of the probabilities (?)
I thought of all of this recently in my own local context. Because of the recession, the State government has imposed on the University a variety of purely symbolic measures to demonstrate our frugality to the voting public. At least in principle, faculty can’t travel out of state even on money that came from grants or awards. And the library and museums were recently instructed to shorten their opening hours, even though those shorter hours don’t in fact save any money.
South Park’s Less-Famous Metaphor
| Dick Langlois |
One of my students sent me this link to a recent South Park episode, which not only effectively skewers the bailout but also has its own take on the nature and meaning of “the market.” A mini-Fable of the Bees for modern times.
Literature Review Bleg
| Dick Langlois |
One of my graduate students has been working on an idea to formalize Henry Hansmann’s approach to the ownership of enterprise. Hansmann thinks about the ownership margin — which set of “patrons” in the nexus of contracts should own the residual rights of control and of income? The idea of this work would be to think simultaneously about the Coasean margin, the boundaries of the firm, which should be determined endogenously along with ownership. That means that firms would have different levels of vertical integration depending on which patrons own them. One interesting question: what happens to the level of vertical integration of banks if the government comes to own them?
We need to locate this idea in the literature and to find out if anyone else has done anything along these lines. So, if you know of anything remotely related, please send it along.
The Economics of Prehistory
| Dick Langlois |
Greg Dow at Simon Fraser is organizing a conference this summer on “Early Economic Developments.”
This conference is a meeting for scholars interested in economic aspects of prehistoric events. The organizers welcome proposals for papers on topics at the boundaries among economics, archaeology, and anthropology. Topics can include economic prehistory, the economics of human biological evolution; pre-industrial economic history; and the evolution of economic, social, and political institutions.
Looks interesting. Abstract deadline is April 15, which I guess isn’t tax day in Canada.
Selection, Meritocracy, and Educational Quality
| Dick Langlois |
We have all heard complaints about the decline in the quality of students over, say, the second half of the twentieth century. The usual interpretation is that this has to do with decline in the quality of schools, especially high schools, or in the curriculum delivered in those schools. I always like to point out to people (that is, to non-economists) that much of the perceived decline is likely a matter of demographic and selection effects. Access to secondary and higher education expanded tremendously after World War II, which changed the underlying distribution of abilities of students finishing high school and attending college. (This is also relevant to discussions of the quality of American college students versus Europeans or others — the fraction of students going on to college is higher in the U. S. than elsewhere, so comparing just the mean is misleading.) Education also became more meritocratic after the War, in that colleges and universities began to screen students by academic ability rather by other characteristics (like income).
I just ran across an interesting new paper by Lutz Hendricks and Todd Schoellman that analyzes these issues in a thorough and illuminating way. Here is the abstract:
Student Abilities During the Expansion of U.S. Education, 1950-2000
Since 1950, U.S. educational attainment has increased substantially. While the median student in 1950 dropped out of high school, the median student today attends some college. In an environment with ability heterogeneity and positive sorting between ability and school tenure, the expansion of education implies a decrease in the average ability of students conditional on school attainment. Using a calibrated model of school choice under ability heterogeneity, we investigate the quantitative impact of rising attainment on ability and measured wages. Our findings suggest that the decline in average ability depressed wages conditional on schooling by 31-58 percentage points. We also find that the entire rise in the college wage premium since 1950 can be attributed to the rising mean ability of college graduates relative to high school graduates.
This has a number of significant implications. As the authors point out, average ability has declined at all levels of schooling. This should color our interpretation of the much-touted fact that real wages haven’t increased much since 1960. At the same time, the wage gap between low and high levels of educational attainment has increased over time — because improved sorting has selected people of higher ability into college and selected people of lower ability out of college.
Railway Gauges and Path Dependency
| Dick Langlois |
You’ve all read the viral email asserting that the railroad gauge we have today — and, in some versions, the size of the space shuttle fuel tanks, which had to be transported by rail — is a direct result of the wheel gauge of Roman chariots. Not surprisingly, the real story is more complex, and many gauges coexisted (and to some extent continue to coexist) in the U.S. and around the world. My former colleague Doug Puffert tells this story in full detail in his new book, Tracks across Continents, which has just appeared from the University of Chicago Press. The book is a useful addition to the catalog of case studies of path-dependent technology.
The book came out of Doug’s thesis at Stanford, where he worked with Paul David and Brian Arthur. He was a visitor at UConn in the 1988-89 academic year. I can still remember his seminar presentations, which involved simulating the evolution of railways on a Macintosh of the era. (One thing you probably won’t learn in Doug’s official bio is that, before coming to UConn, he won a car on Wheel of Fortune. I always tell students about this when I teach the QWERTY story — a student of Paul David who really knew his letter frequencies.)
The Farmer’s Cow
| Dick Langlois |
This morning I read a story in the Hartford Courant about the state legislature’s proposals to save the small local dairy farmer. The naïveté and economic illiteracy of the article filled me with a sudden (and, for me, unusual) urge to post a comment on the newspaper’s website. Here is what I wrote.
This article is awash in errors of commission and omission.
First: it is misleading to the point of mendacity to say that the federal government “tells farmers what prices to set.” The government effectively specifies the price floor — it mandates that farmers set a price no lower than the floor, but it permits farmers to raise the price if they like. What is forcing prices down to the floor is supply and demand.
Second: the plight of the farmers is entirely the fault of the byzantine federal farm-price system, which creates a myriad bad incentives. For a short description with further references, see: http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb_0707_47.pdf
Third: it is wrong to imply that the beneficiaries of the current supply and demand situation are the supermarkets. Retailing milk is a highly competitive industry — milk is often a price loss-leader for convenience stores. The real point is that the milk price support system, and the proposals being considered by the State legislature, will raise the prices consumers pay for milk. This is what economists call a “regressive” transfer. Since poor people spend a larger fraction of their incomes on milk than do affluent people, raising milk prices to keep farmers afloat transfers income from the poorer people in Connecticut to a group whose income is above the state average.
Finally: if you have a Romantic desire to save small or local farmers, you are free to pay extra to buy their milk. Marketing associations like The Farmer’s Cow explicitly brand their milk as local. If it pleases you to do so, spend your own money on local farmers; don’t force poor Connecticut consumers and taxpayers to do it for you.
Irrational Behavior and Rational Addiction
| Dick Langlois |
In 1962, Gary Becker published an article in the JPE called “Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory,” which prompted an interchange with Israel Kirzner (here, here, and here). Becker had tried to argue that one could derive the law of demand without recourse to an assumption of rationality: when relative prices change, the budget constraints of consumers will also change, making some previously available combinations infeasible. This will mean that, in the aggregate, consumers will demand less of the good that has become relatively more expensive. Kirzner pointed out that Becker still hadn’t eliminated rationality, since he is assuming that the consumers are price takers and that the prices are set on the supply side, presumably by firms who notice and respond rationally to price changes. (I discussed the issues here in some detail back in my 1986 book, which, by the way, is back in print in paperback thanks to the new technology of on-demand printing.)
I thought of the Becker-Kirzner exchange recently when I saw the abstract of this article: “So You Want to Quit Smoking: Have You Tried a Mobile Phone?”
Tobacco use, which is rising quickly in developing countries, kills 5.4 million people a year worldwide. This paper explores the impacts of mobile phone ownership on tobacco consumption. Indeed, mobile phone ownership could affect tobacco consumption because individuals might pay for their communication with money they would have spent on tobacco. Using panel data from 2,100 households in 135 communities of the Philippines collected in 2003 and 2006, the analysis finds that mobile phone ownership leads to a 20 percent decline in monthly tobacco consumption. Among households in which at least one member smoked in 2003, purchasing a mobile phone leads to a 32.6 percent decrease in tobacco consumption per adult over the age of 15. This is equivalent to one less pack of 20 cigarettes per month per adult. The results are robust to various estimation strategies. Further, they suggest that this impact materializes through a budget shift from tobacco to communication.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide whether this sheds any light on the Becker-Kirzner exchange. Extra credit: what does this say about Becker’s theory of rational addiction?
Our Collective Delusions
| Dick Langlois |
I just ran across a new NBER working paper by Roland Benabou called “Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets.” Looks like an interesting paper. But why does he pick on this blog? I believe we here at O&M are far more resistant than most to groupthink. And I’m sure you all share this view.
Computable Entrepreneurship
| Dick Langlois |
I just returned from New York, where I was a discussant at a session on entrepreneurship. (Peter was supposed to have been part of the session — too bad he couldn’t make it.) I discussed a presentation by my old friend Roger Koppl. I have written before about Roger’s work on forensic science administration. This presentation, which drew on a couple of Roger’s recent papers (see here and here), was called “Who Needs Entrepreneurs?” Here is the abstract:
The mathematics of “computable economics” proves that entrepreneurship policy is unlikely to succeed if it presumes policy makers can replace the unplanned results of the entrepreneurial market process with ex ante judgments about which enterprises are best. It is mathematically impossible for policy makers or their assignees to make the required computations of opportunity costs. Some business professors dream of finding a grand algorithm that will allow them to guide entrepreneurial decisions and to judge in advance which decisions are good and which bad. The logic of computable economics, however, reveals this dream to be a form of magical thinking.
This is fascinating stuff that should be of considerable interest to O&M readers.
Funding Higher Education
| Dick Langlois |
Inspired by Peter’s post about salaries at private universities, I thought I would write a bit about public universities, notably my own. It was big news in Connecticut this week when Jim Calhoun, our head basketball coach, got nasty with a self-styled activist who attacked him at a post-game press conference. The activist, who had gotten in on a photographer’s press pass, wanted to know how Calhoun could justify his $1.6 million salary at a time of massive state deficits. Calhoun pointed out that, essentially because of him, the basketball program is a big profit maker for the University: it apparently brings in on the order of $12 million and costs about $6 million. The controversy arose because of the less-than-genteel way in which Calhoun made his case, prompting Governor Jodi Rell to issue a rebuke.
It turns out that Calhoun is not only the highest-paid University employee, he is the highest-paid State employee. (See here for a roster of the top state salaries.) The next two on the list are football coach Randy Edsall ($1.38 million) and women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma ($1.31 million). The next three are physicians at the UConn Health Center — in the same specialties noted in the Chronicle article Peter cites: reproductive medicine, dermatology, and neurosurgery. (Basketball may not be brain surgery, but Calhoun won his 800th career game on Wednesday, and Auriemma’s team is a juggernaut likely headed for another undefeated season and a national championship.) UConn president Mike Hogan is seventh on the list. (There is an old story about the university president who was asked how he felt about making less money than the football coach: “he’s had a better year than I have,” was the answer.) (more…)
Patent Pools and Innovation
| Dick Langlois |
In a (fairly) recent paper, which may soon see the light of day in volume from Cambridge University Press, I argued against Alfred Chandler’s analysis of RCA and the early American consumer electronics industry. In Inventing the Electronic Century (2001) Chandler holds that, by creating capabilities (notably central R&D capabilities), RCA was the fountainhead of innovation in that industry, at least until after World War II. I argue instead that, as a government-created patent pool, RCA in fact retarded innovation in what was actually a fairly modular industry. Recently, I came across a paper by two economists from Stanford called “Do Patent Pools Encourage Innovation? Evidence from the 19th-Century Sewing Machine Industry.” They provide quantitative evidence that an earlier patent pool (also) retarded innovation. Here is the abstract:
Regulators favor patent pools to encourage innovation in industries where overlapping patents and excessive litigation suppress innovation. With patent pools, member firms share patents freely with each other and offer one-stop licenses to outside firms. Thus patent pools are expected to promote innovation by reducing litigation risks for pool members and lowering transaction costs for outside firms. We examine this prediction at the example of the first patent pool in U.S. history, the Sewing Machine Combination (1856-1877). Our data confirm that pools reduce litigation risks for members and that pool members patent more in the years leading up to the pool. Pool members, however, patent less as soon as the pool is established and only resume patenting after the pool dissolves. We construct objective measures of performance to examine whether such changes reflect changes in strategic patenting or actual effects on innovation. Performance data suggest that innovation slowed as soon as the pool had been established and resumed only after the pool had been dissolved. Why might patent pools discourage innovation? Our data indicate that pools may discourage innovation by increasing litigation risks for outside firms and by diverting research by outside firms to inferior technologies.
This last point also held true in the case of RCA: as RCA controlled all of the key patents for the radio and licensed them only en bloc, there was no incentive for outsiders to create new products that would compete with only one or two of RCA’s technologies.
Symposium on Alfred Chandler
| Dick Langlois |
I just discovered that Business History Review published a special issue this summer in memory of Alfred Chandler. The papers are mostly short, hagiographic, and written by relatively big names — all as it should be. Tom McCraw mentions one detail I had never known: Chandler was dyslexic.
A Note on Systems Integration
| Dick Langlois |
First let me apologize for being out of circulation for so long. I’ve been inundated with teaching and committee work this semester, but I hope to get back in the swing of things as the year winds down.
The New York Times had an interesting article the other day on a company called Super Micro Computer, a public family-run company in San Jose that puts together leading-edge servers and other hardware for clients that include eBay and Yahoo. The company sells high performance and speed, both the speed of the computer and the speed of the company in designing and delivering its products.
Whereas rivals long ago sent key design work to Asia to take advantage of cheaper, plentiful labor, Super Micro still relies on hundreds of expensive engineers working at its San Jose headquarters. These workers are charged with grabbing the latest and greatest components from suppliers and coming up with new designs months ahead of lumbering heavyweights like Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
Clayton Christensen and his coauthors have argued that a premium on high performance calls for vertical integration and systemic integration in order to fine tune and customize systems, whereas a premium on cost reduction leads to modularity, standardization, and vertical disintegration. The Super Micro case seems to question this conclusion. On the one hand, the company emphasizes design and produces customized units. On the other hand, however, the company is really just a systems integrator — not a vertically integrated company — whose advantage lies in discovering and making use of the innovation of others. In Carliss Baldwin’s phrase, the company “leverages modularity” along the performance margin in much the same way that Dell does (or at least once did) along the cost margin. My conjecture is that, the more inherently modular (whatever that means) the product is, the more systemic integration can be squeezed into a single independent stage of production (systems integration) and the less necessary is genuine vertical integration — even when performance is what matters.
The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility
| Dick Langlois |
Another sign of the Apocalypse: Robert Reich channels Milton Friedman.
Monetary Policy and the Housing Crisis
| Dick Langlois |
I know I’m swimming over my head in macro-infested waters, but I thought I would think out loud some more about the housing mess. In my previous post on the subject (and comments), I posed the question whether a politically influenced (exogenous) lowering of credit standards was more of a culprit than monetary policy (or other macro forces) in causing the housing bubble and subsequent collapse. So I looked at an NBER Working Paper by John Taylor at Stanford that’s been out for a few months. Taylor argues that it was indeed Fed policy that caused the run-up in housing prices. He rejects the alternative possibilities (A) that most of the liquidity fueling the boom was money rushing in to the U.S. from overseas or (B) that it was the increased liquidity that came from securitization and financial innovation. Most interestingly, he argues — as have others, though I can’t find a good reference — that a large part of the reduction in lending standards was endogenous. Foreclosure risk was (is) anticorrelated with an increase in housing prices; so in the run-up, risk of foreclosure was actually declining ceteris paribus. Partly because of the complex and often impenetrable structure of housing finance, lenders took these foreclosure rates as stable in the long term. Moreover, as others have pointed out, lenders were concerned less with default in the run-up than with the risk of early repayment as people refinanced the equity out of their houses (or sold quickly for speculation, as Liebowitz says). All of this meant that lenders considered it optimal to lower credit standards.
This story strikes me as having a Hayekian flavor to it, though I don’t know if Peter and his commentators would agree. It also has something of Leijonhufvud about it, as Taylor’s main message is that the Great Moderation was a matter of the Fed sticking to the program — staying within the “corridor” — and not deviating as it did in 2003-2006, presumably in an effort to stimulate the economy after the Internet crash. The deviation of 2003-06 was “comparable to the turbulent 1970s.”
Political Origins of the Financial Crisis
| Dick Langlois |
Okay, so maybe I’ll write about the financial crisis after all.
Stan Liebowitz has been pointing for a long time to the political origins of lowered lending standards — pressure on Fannie Mae to increase “affordable housing” — and to the role of those lowered standards in the mortgage bubble. “[I]n an attempt to increase homeownership, particularly by minorities and the less affluent, an attack on underwriting standards was undertaken by virtually every branch of the government since the early 1990s. The decline in mortgage underwriting standards was universally praised as an ‘innovation’ in mortgage lending by regulators, academic specialists, GSEs, and housing activists. This weakening of underwriting standards succeeded in increasing home ownership and also the price of housing, helping to lead to a housing price bubble.”
Today the AEI has posted a nice piece by Peter Wallison and Charles Calomiris saying much the same thing. Even more interesting, however, is a long article in Saturday’s New York Times that chronicles the process in great detail.
Capitol Hill bore down on Mr. Mudd as well. The same year he took the top position, regulators sharply increased Fannie’s affordable-housing goals. Democratic lawmakers demanded that the company buy more loans that had been made to low-income and minority homebuyers.
“When homes are doubling in price in every six years and incomes are increasing by a mere one percent per year, Fannie’s mission is of paramount importance,” Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, lectured Mr. Mudd at a Congressional hearing in 2006. “In fact, Fannie and Freddie can do more, a lot more.” (more…)
Amethyst and Public Choice
| Dick Langlois |
Many of you have heard of the Amethyst Initiative, a petition signed (at this writing) by 130 American college and university presidents in favor of lowering the drinking age from 21 back down to 18. As the website puts it, prohibition is not working. The college presidents are hoping that, by removing the black-market character of college drinking in the U.S., lowering the drinking age might be part of a solution to the problem of binge drinking on campus. (Although American 18-year-olds may not buy alcohol because such an activity is unsafe and unhealthy, it is quite alright for the same 18-year-olds to join the military and be posted to Iraq or Afghanistan.) Needless to say, this proposal has generated an enormous amount of controversy, and is vociferously opposed by politically powerful groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The authoritarian response, typified by this column in Slate, is to point to the many studies that show that a higher drinking age reduces driving fatalities, although the Slate article does come around at the very end to the point that economists would make: taxes are more efficient at regulating behavior than is prohibition. (This would also include binge drinking. A student of mine, recently returned from a semester abroad, reports that there is no binge drinking at the National University of Singapore despite a drinking age of 18 — not because of that government’s well-known authoritarianism but because alcohol is highly taxed.) Not, of course, that I would personally like to see higher taxes on my pinot grigio.
My point here is not to engage the debate but to raise a Public Choice point I haven’t seen raised elsewhere. A quick reading of the list of university presidents who have signed suggests that many of them are from private schools. Among the most prominent of these are Dartmouth, Duke, and Johns Hopkins. Public Choice theory might suggest that presidents of state universities are much less likely to sign, since they depend on politicians for funding, and are much less willing to take positions that groups like MADD would oppose. The president of my university is certainly not about to sign it. The six Connecticut schools that have signed are all private, including Trinity College but not including Connecticut College, Wesleyan, or Yale. (Of course, Rick Levin at Yale may be just as reluctant to take unpopular positions given the hungry eye the government has been casting at his endowment.) On the other hand, there are a number of public colleges among the signatories, notably Maryland, UMass, and Ohio State. Are the signatories really biased in favor of private schools? Or are people actually taking moral positions despite possible consequences? That would be interesting. Do we have enough data to tell? Might be an good project for someone talented in the relevant econometrics.
I hesitated at first to post this, since I didn’t see its relevance to the current financial crisis. On reflection, however, it occurred to me that there is an important connection, since the best possible response to the financial crisis might well be binge drinking.
Notes from the Economic History Association Meeting
| Dick Langlois |
I am only now (slowly and partially) emerging from a crush of administrative and teaching responsibilities at the beginning of the semester. But I did manage to drive down to New Haven last weekend for some of the Economic History Association meeting. It was an eventful meeting in many respects, including a fire at the hotel Thursday night that sent conference-goers into the street in their pajamas as well as an apparent outbreak of food poisoning from the Saturday night banquet. Happily, I was spared both of those experiences.
For at least two of the three sessions I managed to attend, there emerged a theme: that a lot of interesting work in economic history today is rediscovering and reinventing ideas that Nate Rosenberg, Paul David, and others were discussing in the 1970s and earlier: learning by doing and factor prices, technological and economic complementarities, and general-purpose technologies. (I have been known to talk about the Stanford School in this respect.)
In his keynote address on Saturday — evidently similar to his Clarendon Lectures last year and probably dating back at least to this paper — Daron Acemoglu talked about the issue of skill bias in technological change. In the 1970s, labor economists were arguing that Americans were investing too much in education, since rising wage rates should lead to labor-saving technical change, which would reduce the supply of skilled jobs. Of course, just the opposite happened: skilled jobs grew even faster than skilled workers, creating a skill premium in the U.S. Acemoglu presented a clever general-equilibrium model in which the bias of technological change is endogenous. Under certain assumptions, supply of a factor of production (like skilled labor) can create its own demand. The intuition is that a larger supply of a factor (like skilled labor) can increase the market for complementary innovations to an extent that offsets other effects. (For my own Rosenbergian take on why technical change should be biased toward higher skill levels, see here.) Interestingly, Joel Mokyr discussed Acemoglu’s presentation using a 1975 Paul David paper as a framework. (more…)
Postcard from Scandinavia
| Dick Langlois |
Taking up Nicolai’s challenge, I offer a substance-free post in the spirit of Facebook. I am in Scandinavia, where I will have a chance to interact with both of my local co-bloggers. At the moment I am in Copenhagen, where I will participate in a Ph.D. course that Nicolai and his colleagues have organized. But I just returned from Bergen, where I met Lasse for the first time. I gave a talk at NHH and had a chance to see a bit of the city. Bergen is a beautiful place, and I was fortunate to see in it perfect weather, something I am told is rare on the rainy west coast of Norway. As I learned in the local museum, Bergen was one of four Hanseatic “office” cities (along with London, Bruges, and Novgorod), and it mainly traded salted fish and cod-liver oil — the first Norwegian oil industry — for grain products from Britain and the Baltic. I was also treated to whale meat for an appetizer at dinner last night — a politically incorrect meal in an otherwise politically correct country. (Since a whale is a mammal, it was more like beef than fish; but as it was served as a highly spiced (cooked) carpaccio, it was hard to determine the real taste: maybe just a bit gamier than beef.)
The mercantile spirit is apparently still alive and well in Scandinavia. On the Copenhagen metro a little while ago, I spotted a young Dane sporting a T-shirt depicting bars of gold and proclaiming the slogan “the original currency of kings.” I intuited immediately that this wasn’t a Ron Paul supporter but a would-be hip-hop teenager. It turns out the that the shirt is made by a company called LRG, which is lauded as an up-and-coming (American) entrepreneurial venture. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to find a place to buy one cheaply on the web: it would be great to wear for lectures on monetary policy or on inflation in the early modern period. I think I will skip the dollar-sign bling, though.
Organizations and Markets 
Recent Comments