◑Economics

No single person knows how to make a pencil, which is the clearest available illustration of distributed coordination.

Individually rational use of a shared resource destroys it — an argument later substantially qualified by Ostrom's fieldwork.

In a panic, lend freely at a penalty rate against good collateral — the rule central banks still reach for a century and a half later.

Firms exist because using the market has transaction costs; the boundary of the firm sits where those costs balance.

The economic problem is the dispersal of knowledge, and prices are the mechanism that aggregates what no planner can collect.

Asymmetric information can collapse a market entirely, even when mutually beneficial trades exist.

Inclusive versus extractive institutions, not geography or culture, best explain the long-run divergence in national prosperity.

Argues credit preceded coinage and barter never existed as described, making debt a moral institution before an economic one.

Argues that output is set by aggregate demand and that an economy can settle at persistent underemployment — the founding text of macroeconomics.

Founds game theory and expected utility in one volume, and gives the social sciences a formal language for strategic interaction.

Self-regulating markets were created by state action, not discovered, and treating land and labour as commodities provokes society to push back.

People evaluate outcomes as gains and losses from a reference point, which breaks expected utility theory in predictable ways.

Documents real communities that manage shared resources sustainably without privatisation or state control, and extracts the design principles.

Puts the identification strategy before the estimator: what makes a comparison credible matters more than the sophistication of the regression.

The reference on taxation and public spending, and on the unavoidable trade-off between efficiency and distribution.

The standard text on trade and exchange rates, including why the gains from trade are real and unevenly distributed at the same time.

Wage inequality tracks whether schooling keeps pace with skill-biased technical change — a century of American data behind one mechanism.

Two centuries of tax records showing returns on capital outpacing growth, so inherited wealth concentrates unless something interrupts it.