Art Carden asks which economists should have gotten a Nobel Prize before they died. (Nobels are not given posthumously.) In the list: Mises, Frank Knight, Tullock, Alchian, William Baumol and Julian Simon, among others. On a related note, here is an essay by Donald Boudreaux on Buchanan and the political economy of debt funding. The key point: “we spend other people’s money more profligately than we spend our own.”
A textbook chapter on Cryptonomics by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok in their “Marginal Revolution.” They write in their summary: “In all of these crypto and blockchain areas, there are at least two kinds of uncertainty. The first is how effectively crypto and blockchain innovators will be able to capture additional gains from trade.The second question is how the authorities will regulate these markets.”
Sudipto Mundle: “Three broad groups of states are identifiable, each with a distinct development model. First, there are the least developed states represented here by Bihar and its development model. This group includes Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Assam and all the north-eastern states, among others. Many of these states are growing at rates comparable to the national average, but the high growth rates are misleading because of their low base. These states have very low per capita incomes, low levels of human or social development and also of infrastructure development….At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Gujarat model. A fast-growing state, Gujarat also has a high per capita income, nearly 6 times that of Bihar. A large share of its workforce is still dependent on agriculture, yet Gujarat is one of India’s most industrialized states, with the industry share of GSDP way above the national average at 44%…The odd thing is that in social development, such as education and health outcomes, the state has lagged well behind the country’s leading states. This deficit is a major handicap in the 21st century, when the quality of human resources determines competitiveness…A third and most interesting development model is that of Tamil Nadu. A prosperous state with high per capita income, it is also one of India’s most industrialized states like Gujarat, with industry accounting for over 34% of GSDP. But unlike Gujarat, Tamil Nadu has brought down the share of its workforce in agriculture to 30% and the state also scores high on social development…All this has been achieved despite Tamil Nadu’s modest size of government at 13.5% of GSDP, which is well below the national average. The state’s dependence on central transfers is also quite low, in fact lower than Gujarat’s. The Tamil Nadu model of development is thus the most successful model under Indian conditions.”