Note: This review originally appeared in two parts as part of my weekly newsletter about research on innovation. Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy is a Sign of Success by Dietrich Vollrath is a deep dive into economic statistics that implicitly argues there’s not much evidence for a “technological stagnation”…

Note: I’ve started a weekly newsletter on recent research on the economics of innovation (you can sign up here). Normally I create a twitter-thread about the my posts, but this week the content seemed uniquely bad for twitter, so I’m posting here instead and linking via twitter. To an important…

For the last few years, I’ve tried to loosely rank the books I read from most to least favorite. But, as you’ll see, I’m pretty enthusiastic about most of the books, since I usually just quit reading stuff I don’t like. I read 50/53 books this year, depending on whether…

A few weeks ago, I ran across the following argument from Scott Sumner’s blog: The film industry is in long-term decline, which happens to all art forms after they express their most potent ideas. Painting peaked in the 1500s and 1600s. Pop music in the 1960s and 1970s. …

This semester I’m teaching a new class on the economics of innovation targeted to interested undergraduates from a wide range of backgrounds (the only prerequisite is Econ 101) and I thought others might find the reading list interesting. The readings are usually anchored to recent research in the economics of…

My #1 advice to new economists is to get on twitter and plug into the #EconTwitter community. This document is a guide on how to do that. …

People are writing about how to revitalize flagging rural economics, so it seems a good time to share my thoughts (a bit of background — I recently moved back to Iowa after living in Washington, and lived in London for a few years before that). At the most fundamental level…

Minerva is a new university best known for its global campus. Students spend their first year in San Francisco, and then each class moves en masse through Seoul, Hyderabad, Buenos Aires, Berlin, London, and Taipei over the remaining six semesters. During my undergraduate years, studying abroad was an important experience…

Between the new baby, new house, and new job, I didn’t read as much this year as last year. I made it through 45 books. Of those, 8 were plays by Shakespeare. If I ever read all of his works, I’ll make a post about them. …