100 Years of Coase

Yesterday was Nobel Economist Coase's 100th birthday. A Boudreaux (2007) article celebrates one of his less-known articles on a fallacy of relying solely on marginal cost to determine value.

To celebrate, here are a few links that serve to either reduce our research transaction costs or to correct other economics fallacies:

IFPRI has released a new weekly food price series going back to 1998 with daily data for futures back to 2001. It includes hard wheat, soft wheat, soybeans, maize, and rice.

Nick Rowe demonstrates that there are no income effects. Well, not from price changes anyway.

Yes, thing are bad in Haiti one year after the earthquake. This is par for the course after disasters everywhere.

Is government growing or shrinking? Yglesias repeatedly shows that total government employment is down slightly as state and local governments are shedding workers. The federal government, however, has been growing its workforce: a little in 2002 and a lot since the recession started. It's not just the retired census workers. Oddly enough, it's Krugman showing us the graph that demonstrates it, though we need to turn to Murphy for the pointer and a response to Yglesias:

But I bet if a had a bullhorn I could get a Tea Party crowd pretty worked up by saying, "Can you patriots believe this? The federal government is growing, while state and local governments have to lay off teachers and firefighters! So grab your pitchforks and let's go give Obama a lesson in federalism he'll never forget!"