Michael Munger
Look With Two Is
“Look at institutional arrangements as they actually play out, making the comparison by looking through two Is: information and incentives.” ~Michael Munger
Commoditizing Excess Capacity
“If all the cars, and apartments, have people using them, and all the tools have people making things with them, we will need far fewer of those things. We have ‘enough’ stuff, it’s just in the closet.” ~Michael Munger
Division of Labor Makes Us Wealthy…And Fragile
“Our dependence on the ability to serve others in highly specialized ways is contingent on the rest of the system working constantly and efficiently. Our shrinking command of general competence puts us at greater risk.” ~Michael Munger
Property in Words: Not Even Under Suspicion
“Respect for the creators of ideas, and the words through which those ideas are conveyed in the literature, is the highest value we have in the academy.” ~Michael Munger
ChatGPT is a Calculator; Deal with It
“For many routine tasks—and, honestly, most writing is routine, not creative—it is faster and actually better to have the AI create the text, at least for the first draft.” ~Michael Munger
I Fought the Google, and the Google Won
“The plaintiffs were all taxpayers in NC, but we had no actual say about how those payments taken from us were to be spent, even if the spending violated the Constitution of the state.” ~Michael Munger
Argentina Agonistes: The Separation of Money and State
“The Argentine peso has lost 93 percent of its value in just the past 4 years. Anyone who could carry out transactions using dollars always did so; holding pesos was little different from simply setting your wealth on fire.” ~Michael Munger
Capitalism is a “DDoLL”
“One thousand people can be unimaginably more wealthy than eight people. Division of labor is the most important source of increasing returns to scale in the market system.” ~Michael Munger
Taxation as Social Justice
“The goal is not to raise revenue so we can support the poor; instead, the US is pursuing the simpler goal of eliminating private concentrations of wealth.” ~Michael Munger
State Development Incentives: Taxes, Investment, and Tullock Auctions
“State ‘incentive’ packages do more than pay companies the difference in costs. Politicians have every reason to pay up to, and beyond, the entire economic benefit to the state, because their calculus counts costs as benefits.” ~ Michael Munger
