A Year After U.S.A.I.D.’s Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss

This story is heartbreaking.

Did you and Ben form a German-language blue-eyed soul group or is that your author photo?

Also the distinction Warsh is apparently drawing (though it's not being drawn in the pictured text) does not line up with the distinction between "monetary" and "regulatory" functions that are pushed in the law review lit.

The pictured text doesn't seem to make that distinction. Is it elsewhere in the document?

Got it! I'm just encouraging some hesitation in applying Baumol's framework and careful attention to its purported mechanisms. It comes with more baggage than one might expect.

Well before Baumol, Truman's commission on higher ed described a similar dynamic. But they argued that the cost savings in other industries produced more surplus to be reinvested in less efficient industries that we value as a society. Not an automatic adjustment mechanism

(2) even if you accept the general story about changes labor productivity (various reasons to doubt it--e.g. monopsony), there's still the question of why we don't more frequently just bear the higher costs, especially given higher absolute income.

I see what you're saying, and (not my area either) I agree the general story is plausible. But (1) the cost disease story is not just about relative labor productivity but the attraction of workers toward less productive (in one sense) industries, bc they have higher wages and...

Maybe so, though that’s not the cost disease (which is what happens to less efficient industries that attract workers with high wages).

It’s supposed to be whether labor productivity (output per worker) has been relatively slow to increase. That’s possibly true for construction—I dunno! But increased health standards and difficulty of outsourcing would likely be lumped in there on the labor cost side. And capital cost has gone up

Construction is an industry with relatively few labor saving innovations?

Today's the day!

It's one of those articles that I feel like I need to decide on the ending before I can decide how to write it.

bsky.app/profile/look...

I'm going to start telling economists to do that.

"Have you heard of Scitovsky?"

Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries For over a century, fixed prices have made markets more transparent. Surveillance pricing threatens to reverse that progress by allowing corporations to secretly tailor prices using personal data.

OK the fact that this was published at @lpeblog.bsky.social clarifies that I need to finally finish that article on why theoretical foundations of price discrim arguments are all messed up. Consumer surplus and info asymmetry are just free floating concepts here!

lpeproject.org/blog/surveil...

That depends on whether other parts of the higher ed system get their shit together. If everybody is facing cuts, the exit options will be narrow. Profs with plum jobs will have to take risks and organize

Many academics--conservative and liberal--looking on horror. Few doing anything about it. Indeed, many declining to do anything about it out of self preservation, cowardice, or a sense that doing so would be somehow uncouth

We'd be seeing way more of this if blue states had functional higher education policies

Now is the moment when millennial socialists are starting to hold power, no?

Was?

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity Great swathes of rock music since the nineteen-sixties would never have existed, we're sometimes told, were it not for the recordings of Robert Johnson. Certainly the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Cla...

Holy SHIT someone found the test pressing of Robert Johnson's Cross Road Blues and it is clear as a PIN www.openculture.com/2026/04/reco...

I'm not quite sure the conceptual apparatus holds up, but I haven't made it all the way through yet. In any case, incredible data work and provocative findings

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Yes, but the interlock concept lives on, with interesting new permutations

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Title of a previous edition of "Some of the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship"

Did you or a scholar whose work you love have an article accepted this academic year? If so, let us know!

Later this month, we’ll highlight some of the hottest LPE and LPE-adjacent work from the past two cycles. Send nominations to managingeditor@lpeblog.org. Self-noms highly encouraged!

Gotta get myself fired up to write the most boring article

Even wilder is that the technical literature is all like "amt & division of surplus is highly sensitive to assumptions about demand aggregation, whether IID holds, number of firms, ease of entry, etc" and all the policy debate is like "price discrim is generally good if consumers are rational"

Absolutely wild to read all the literature--inc from neoclassicals!--explaining how integrating under a demand curve never makes sense as a welfare analysis and then turn to the literature on price discrimination and it's just...integrating under demand curves

Arbitrage opportunity, I guess

I have bad news about neoclassical economic theory

Five screenshots of article

The final version of my article The Deregulation of Cancer is finally out in @tamu.bsky.social Texas A&M Law Review.

I argue that we can't understand rising cancer rates in young people without understanding the erosion of cancer regulatory regimes. Useful for health law, cancer, and adlaw scholars