Market Urbanism

Liberalizing cities | From the bottom up

“Market Urbanism” refers to the synthesis of classical liberal economics and ethics (market), with an appreciation of the urban way of life and its benefits to society (urbanism). We advocate for the emergence of bottom up solutions to urban issues, as opposed to ones imposed from the top down.

Urban[ism] Legend: Positive NPV Infrastructure

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As Washington debates how many hundreds-of-billions of the nearly trillion-dollar stimulus will go towards infrastructure or to other spending/tax cut schemes, pundits claim that spending billions on "shovel ready" public works projects can effectively create jobs that will lead to recovery. As … [Read more...]

Irrationality Towards Shortages

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Brendan Crain at Where tipped me off to a great post by Ryan Avent at The Bellows. Here's a little snippet of Shortage:For whatever reason, we’re not built to naturally internalize negative externalities. When riding on a crowded highway, no one (no non-economist, at any rate) curses the … [Read more...]

Landmark Incentives

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by Sandy IkedaThe other day I was lecturing to my students about externalities and the Coase Theorem.  One of the examples I used came directly from the our textbook – Heyne, Boettke, & Prychitko’s The Economic Way of Thinking.  It asks what would happen if you tried to declare a large tree … [Read more...]

Talking points on the housing bubble

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By Sandy IkedaLast week I spoke to a standing-room-only crowd of students and faculty about the current economic and financial turmoil.  I shared the podium with three of my colleagues, who range all the way from far to the left of Barack Obama to very, very far to the left of Barack Obama.  … [Read more...]

Market Meltdown and Bailout Videos

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Wow! This market is a mess.As a great follow up to his posts at CafeHayek on government's intervention in the housing market, Russell Roberts discusses the situation and bailout with reason.tv:Also...Here's the video from an Economics forum discussion at MIT (my Alma mater) on … [Read more...]

Glaeser: Let Housing Prices Fall

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Ed Glaeser gives three compelling reasons why the government should end their infatuation with high housing prices. (Nonetheless, some of the same politicians speak through the other side of their mouths about promoting housing affordability): Why We Should Let Housing Prices Keep FallingThere … [Read more...]

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