The Becker-Posner Blog
The Becker-Posner Blog explores current issues in economics, law and policy.
Author: Co-author Gary Becker is an economics and sociology professor at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business who won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1967, the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992, the National Medal of Science in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. He has authored seven books on the subject of economics, and he has also co-authored Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment with a fellow University of Chicago professor Kevin Murphy and co-authored The Economics of Life with his wife, Guity Nashat Becker. Blawg co-author Richard Posner is a judge on the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. He teaches part time at the University of Chicago Law School and has written 30 books, most recently A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, How Judges Think, The Little Book of Plagiarism and Economic Analysis of Law. He also authors A Failure of Capitalism.
Blawg Related Categories: Judiciary • Legal Theory • University of Chicago • Judge • Blawg 100 • Economics
Recent Posts from The Becker-Posner Blog
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President Obama's Financial Reform Package-Becker
Since the document laying out the President's financial reform package is 88 pages, I will concentrate my evaluation on a few basic issues. 1) Do the reforms rely mainly on regulatory discretion or on new…
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Financial Regulatory Reform--Posner's Comment
I have blogged at considerable length about the July 17 report, see http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/richard_posner/, and also written a short op-ed on the subject, published in the New York Times on July 25 ("Our Crisis of Regulation,"…
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The Future of Newspapers--Posner
Warren Buffett, who is a wit as well as a multibillionaire, said with reference to the fact that Bernard Madoff's long-running Ponzi scheme came to light during the financial collapse of last fall that until…
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The Social Cost of the Decline of Newspapers?Becker
According to data compiled by my colleagues Matt Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, the number of daily newspapers in the United States has been declining for more than 90 years, from a peak of about 2200…
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Notice
We will post on Tuesday of this week, rather than today....
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The Fatal Conceit: A Pay "Czar"-Becker
This week the Obama administration, acting through Secretary of the Treasury Geithner, appointed a pay czar to review, reject, and possibly set the pay of companies that received large amounts of federal assistance during the…
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The Pay Czar and Compensation Issues--Posner's Comment
I agree with Professor Bebchuk of Harvard, and others, that there is a problem with the compensation of top executives at publicly held corporations (that is, corporations in which ownership is widely dispersed), so that…
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The Administration's Health Care Plan--Posner
It is understandable why there is widespread concern with the American system of health care. The nation spends about 15 percent of its very large Gross Domestic Product on health care, which is almost twice…
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Health Care-Becker
The best way to evaluate America's expensive health care system would be to estimate the effects of different kinds of healthcare on the quality and quantity of health for individuals of various ages, incomes, races,…
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Is the World Economic Center of Gravity Moving to Asia? Becker
The short answer is "yes", although not immediately, and not inevitably. My reasons for an affirmative answer are partly demographic and partly economic. Asia has a large fraction of the world's population, and their biggest…