“The licensing of occupations—a very forceful intervention in markets—is pervasive and growing in modern economies. Yet the attention paid to it by economists and economics textbooks has been small. Highly welcome, therefore, has been the extensive and intensive work on this subject by Morris Kleiner. Kleiner’s latest book, titled Stages of Occupational Regulation: Analysis of Case Studies (2013), explores the progression of occupational regulation, from mere registration to certification to outright licensing—three distinct stages. Kleiner carefully selects for his analysis a series of occupations representing the stages of regulation, devoting a chapter to each occupation. He uses a variety of statistical approaches to tease out, from numerous databases, what the impact of mild to heavy regulation on labor markets appears to be. Kleiner’s work leads him to call for a pervasive review of occupational regulation in the United States, with a view towards replacing occupational licensure, which introduces the most inefficiency and welfare loss, with mere certification of occupations. That recommendation gains plausibility in an age where cheap computation and data mining makes it possible to protect consumers from low-quality and possibly dangerous services by providing robust, user-friendly information on the quality of services delivered by competing occupations, such as doctors and nurse practitioners.”
“I’m basically an internet nerd,” Galbraith said. “We normally try to replace middlemen with a platform. But if you look at innovation in payments, I’m not so sure it’s going well.” Citing more than 600 mobile payment startups, Galbraith pointed out that all of them were attempting to introduce a new payments system on top of already existing platforms. Similarly, the need to control the platform payments come from means that “bitcoin is irrelevant,” Galbraith said. “It’s opposed to market forces, which favour platform monopolies.” If the future of money did come from the internet, he argued, it would come from one of those monopolies. “It’s not inconceivable that Facebook de facto becomes a bank, they have the scale. But Apple could have done that a long time ago, but it hasn’t. Why? Because the multiples in being a tech firm are better than banking, so why go into banking?”