Day: October 20, 2007

What and How

Mr Adam Smith

It is not just an article of faith among economists (such as yours truly) that markets allocate resources most efficiently under a set of set of assumptions; it has been mathematically proved by theoreticians and empirically demonstrated in thousands of well-documented instances. However, that does not make the proposition that markets work better than other mechanisms – such as command and control – any more intuitive or easy for people to appreciate. It is easy to misunderstand, misinterpret, and often misrepresent.
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Creative Commons License

I am often asked by people if they can re-publish my blog posts. Most of what you read on this blog is original in the sense that I write the stuff and therefore by common convention, automatically the copyright to the material belongs to me. I have the freedom to assign rights to my work to others of course. There is an extremely flexible mechanism which has been developed for this purpose and I think it is worthwhile for us to become familiar with it — or if you already know it to some extent, revising your understanding of it. I am referring to the Creative Commons, an institution which is attempting to (and has succeeded to a marvelous degree) create a lot of middle ground between the polar extremes of “All Rights Reserved” — generally denoted by the (C) sign — and “Public Domain” — where the author has no rights at all.

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