The Answer Is Transaction Costs
"The real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it." -Adam Smith (WoN, Bk I, Chapter 5)
In which the Knower of Important Things shows how transaction costs explain literally everything. Plus TWEJ, and answers to letters.
If YOU have questions, submit them to our email at taitc.email@gmail.com
There are two kinds of episodes here:
1. For the most part, episodes June-August are weekly, short (<20 mins), and address a few topics.
2. Episodes September-May are longer (1 hour), and monthly, with an interview with a guest.
Finally, a quick note: This podcast is NOT for Stacy Hockett. He wanted you to know that.....
The Answer Is Transaction Costs
Latest Episodes
God Speaks Hebrew But Understands Yiddish
We trace how Hebrew goes from a “museum language” to a living vernacular by treating language as a coordination good with huge network effects and real transaction costs. We follow Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s strategy for lowering those costs, then wa...
The Main Course was Transaction Costs: Milton's Dinner with Ronald
We tell the story of the Chicago dinner where Ronald Coase walks into a hostile room, and by the end everyone votes with him, led by Milton Friedman changing his mind in real time. Along the way, we unpack why transaction costs, not moral blame...
Regime Uncertainty: Political Risk is Transaction Cost!
We walk through the weirdly powerful math that makes a stable $10,000 profit stream worth $50,000 in one world and $1,000,000 in another. Then we apply the same present value logic to politics and show how unpredictable rules raise transaction ...
The Senate Is The Enemy And Other Friction Stories
We argue that “friction” is not always a flaw and can be a deliberate shield against bad collective decisions. We use Buchanan and Tullock’s public choice framework to show why supermajorities, veto points, and other transaction costs can prote...
Fan Mail
Hi Mike, I'm listening to your episode on pins and division of labour and it makes me think about how "specialization of labour" can be misleading, at least in today's economy. It may be that specialization in a particular factory job involves being particularly capable at a particular rote task, e.g. laying a brass wire flat, but equally a person who has particular knowledge of law, biology and programming may be in a sense exceptionally specialized in the task of "using large language models to aggregate medical patents". Multidisciplinary and specialized sound like they should opposites, but they're really not!
Quebec