One thing we’ve learned from the economic events of the past two years is that macroeconomics, or at least the part of macroeconomics that studies th… - Richard Posner

The importance to economics of the study of institutions is no longer a controversial proposition, thanks in part to the scholarly literature generated by the new institutional economics movement. Institutions are more than organizations – property is an institution, but not an organization – but organizations are an important form of institution and will be the focus of my paper, as it is, to a considerable extent, of the new institutional economics.

If judges are pragmatic, as I think they largely are in our system, it can only be in the everyday sense of the term. But immediately the counterexample of Holmes, a gifted and serious though not systematic philosophical thinker, comes to mind.

My reaction to “creative capitalism” as lauded by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Kinsley, and (somewhat to my surprise), Professor Glaeser of the Harvard Economics Department is a skeptical one. The embrace of massive corporate charity, the criticism of capitalism by its greatest beneficiaries, and the frequent resort by the advocates of “creative capitalism” to platitudes (such as: “the world is getting better, but not fast enough and not for everyone”; “today’s miracles of technology only benefit those who can afford them”; “economic demand is not the same as economic need”), along with the vagueness of the term itself, leave me with an uncomfortable feeling.