Economics

A “resort” community where there is no central commercial resort can still be a one-industry economy. In the case of the South Fork of Long Island (aka “Hamptons”), the one trick is luxury housing. There’s an extensive commercial/labor ecosystem to support it.  read more »

I recently got a detailed email from a friend in the Pacific Northwest outlining a possible venture she and her husband are considering. I was one of several people they asked to review the proposal.  read more »

It’s hard to say the word “innovation” and not think of California. Technology has paced the state’s growth in everything from agriculture and oil to housing, entertainment, and aerospace. California has always been the harbinger of the American future, the promise of ever-greater economic and social progress.  read more »

For decades, New York has been the leading exporter of people to other states, though has been severely challenged since 2000 by California. During five years around the housing bust, more net domestic migrants left California than New York. Then, for a time, California’s annual losses were not quite as severe  read more »

Despite the relentless media drum-banging around the alarmist COVID-19 narrative, this particular virus is not the Black Death. Official numbers have the Canadian death count so far just below 11,000, bad for sure, but not hugely off the yearly flu toll in Canada which kills 6,500 to 8,000 people.  read more »

For all his ugliness and buffoonery, Donald Trump got some big things right, politically and practically, that Joe Biden will undo at his own peril. Almost all of Trump’s wins, abroad and at home, have one thing in common: They focused on most Americans achieving broader prosperity and not only the best-off.  read more »

Thousands of people on the coasts are pleading for help getting out of the urban enclaves from which they once looked down their noses at us, out in Flyover Country.

How should we respond? By taking advantage of an economic-development opportunity for the ages.  read more »

It’s thirty years this autumn since I began my undergraduate degree at Durham University in the North East of England. To tell you the truth I didn’t know much about the city before I applied there. My visit for the three required interviews was very enjoyable, and more positive than some of the less elite institutions I had applied to. I enjoyed looking about the Norman castle and cathedral set high on a hill surrounded by the moat-like River Wear.  read more »

Like many, if not most Americans, I am somewhat relieved to see the petulant, nasty and sometimes clearly unhinged Donald Trump leave the White House. Yet for all his antics and vitriol, Trump has left a legacy that will be difficult to ignore and, given the dispensation of his opponents, could shape the future for the next decade.  read more »

We cannot hope to have a functional democracy when property and information are controlled by a small number of companies tightly allied with political power.  read more »