Political Economy

An exploration of how the gasoline tax created a dedicated funding stream for roads while systematically undermining transit, leading to auto-dependent cities and the Great Streetcar Scandal.

Tracing the origins of the gasoline tax as a user-funded model that created a self-reinforcing loop favoring roads over transit, setting the stage for America's auto-dependent infrastructure.

An exploration of the hidden costs and externalities of convenience in modern systems, from design philosophy to political economy.

The Free Trade Myth: free trade is not the magic bullet it's claimed to be.

This post examines the two most common non-economic explanations for why poor countries stay poor: corruption and culture. It evaluates the empirical relationship between corruption and growth, asks why culturally identical countries at different levels of development exhibit different behavioral patterns, and traces the historical use of cultural argument as post-hoc justification for development outcomes.

This post examines the macroeconomic policy prescriptions applied to developing countries through IMF conditionality, evaluating the empirical relationship between inflation, interest rates, fiscal policy, and economic growth across the historical record. It draws on the cases of Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, and Argentina to assess whether the standard orthodoxy of very low inflation and balanced budgets produces the outcomes its proponents claim.

This post examines the history and current architecture of the international intellectual property rights system, tracing its evolution from the first patent law in 15th-century Venice through the 1994 TRIPS agreement. It asks whether the current system reflects a principle of rewarding innovation or a mechanism for managing competition between nations at different stages of technological development.