Sudan's government ends gas subsidies. Gas prices shoot up. Country erupts in deadly protests.

Lesson: Once a bad policy is in place, it's very hard to undo it. Much easier to not institute bad policy in the first place.

New York Times article: Sudan Erupts in Deadly Protests as Gas Prices Rise.

I've been watching the lectures in Yuval Harari's Coursera course: A Brief History of Humankind. It's the history course that I've always wanted to take, and the lectures have been great so far.

I'm not really getting the full MOOC experience because I'm only watching the lectures--not doing quizzes, participating in forums, etc. But some quick thoughts on the video watching experience so far:

- The lecture experience is about as good as sitting in the front row of a large introductory class and better than sitting in the back row (which is where I usually sat in my big intro courses).

- The big advantage is that I can watch the videos whenever I want (I watch on the treadmill), and I can pause/rewind etc. as needed.

- Disadvantage is that I can't (yet) watch it with others. Would be nice to be able to watch the lectures with some friends. I think people should be able to meet up online to watch the videos together. They should be able to pause the common video, message each other, etc. Kinda like a google hangout version of a class. It's nice to have fellow students.

- Coursera's video technology, at least on my iPad, is not as good as YouTube, Netflix, etc. Doesn't show how far the video has played, can't full-screen easily, doesn't remember where it left off, no 10-second-replay button etc. I'm sure these are all easy fixes and will be resolved eventually.

- If I'm charged $10 to watch the rest of the lectures, I'll pay. Maybe that's how they can make money?

A wonderful article by Hugh Howey, darling of self-published authors everywhere. He made it big with his science fiction dystopian Wool, which became a bestseller. He has sold a million books over the last two years and is rich and famous beyond his dreams. But apparently these aren't the best days of his life.

IndieReader: The Best Days of My Life

Ronald Coase, a unique soul among economists, passed away last week at the age of 102. He has been my favorite economist for a long time now--both for the simplicity, depth and power of his ideas, as well as his unwavering intellectual independence. He was severely underestimated in his early career. But I think he was also underestimated after he came to Chicago, debated the econ department, became famous, won the Nobel Prize, and all that. The world tends to reward the scintillating and brilliant over the slow and profound. And Coase was definitely in the slow and profound camp.

In my opinion, the 1937 paper on the theory of the firm is his best. It's a simple, powerful observation. It's one of the most cited papers in economics, but starting with Alchian and Demsetz's (excellent) 1972 paper, economists working on the theory of the firm have actually moved away from Coase's view of the firm. According to Coase, firms and markets are alternate methods of coordinating resources. So coordination is the central role of the firm. Modern theories of the firm, however, tend to view firms as contractual arrangements that solve some incentive problem. These theories do not feature a coordination problem at all. The allocations are all well known in these models, so no coordination is required. Firms are simply contractual arrangements between parties that solve incentive problems. My second year paper on the theory of the firm argued that the coordinating role is the primary function of the firm. I tried to show how entrepreneurs attempting to coordinate pieces of the economy will end up creating the special contractual arrangements that we call firms.

I'll end with a personal anecdote: Since I'd written a paper more aligned with Coase's coordinating story, I thought I should send it to him. His office was nearby at the University of Chicago Law School, so I decided to swing by and drop it off. He wasn't in, but his research assistant was. I left the paper with the assistant along with a note. A few months later, an envelope personally addressed by Coase in old-fashioned cursive handwriting arrived in the mail. The letter inside--also handwritten--informed me that the great man was not currently working on the theory of the firm but would return to the topic in the future and would read it when he did. I admired his optimism. He must have been 93 at the time!

RIP, Professor Coase.

Here's a summary about Coase's contributions.

Neat article on how a persuasive but flawed study led to the conclusion that left-handed people die nine years earlier than right-handed people. The research was published in top journals (Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine) in the late 1980s/early 1990s: . From the article:

"[The researchers] took a list of the people who had recently died and contacted their families, asking whether or not their relative had been right- or left-handed.

Looking at 2,000 cases, they saw that the average age at death of the left-handers was about nine years younger than of the right-handers. On that basis, they concluded that left-handers died earlier.

At first glance, that seems persuasive. What did the researchers do wrong?"

Can you guess what they did wrong? For the answer, read the article in the BBC.

Want to reduce our planet's carbon emissions? Greg Mankiw explains why a carbon tax works better than other policies:

New York Times: A Carbon Tax That America Could Live With