About This Blog

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EconAir is an economics and political blog containing about 200 essays and posts written mostly by Bennett Greenberg, a retired professor of economics with experience teaching across the full undergraduate economics curriculum as well as related disciplines such as economic history, business strategy, finance, and political economy. Experience includes economist and corporate planning manager for three S&P 500 companies, consultant to small businesses, brokering a large acquisition, managing director of a small company, and board member of five nonprofits. Since retirement, also interested in political and economic lessons from history.

The central theme of this blog is that innovation and information are the driving forces of economic development, economic growth, competition, and market structure. Modern capitalism is best understood as a dynamic process, not a static system of markets tending toward some hypothetical equilibrium. The Industrial and Digital Revolutions are permanent revolutions.

Traditional economic theory emphasizes price, equilibrium, and perfect competition. While somewhat useful as abstractions, these models often fail to explain how real economies actually work and change. EconAir focuses instead on:

  • technological and organizational innovation,
  • the economic role of information and information technology, including AI,
  • the strategic competitive behavior of corporations,
  • market structure - imperfect competition and oligopoly,
  • the global economy of multinational companies in a world of nation-states,
  • and the historical evolution of economic dynamics and institutions.

A recurring argument throughout this blog is that large corporations dominate modern economies not through price competition but through innovation, scale, scope, and control of information. Markets are rarely perfectly competitive; they are shaped by negotiation, strategy, market-makers, asymmetric information and power relationships among firms, governments, and consumers.

Economic theory is therefore presented here as:

  • historically grounded,
  • institutionally informed, and
  • integrated with business strategy and economic history.


Other topics include:

Future global demographics and demographic studies of China, Japan, and the United States with possible economic consequences.

Country economic studies of China, India, and Nigeria.


In addition, some historical topics:

The collapse of the Roman Republic.

         Possible lessons for modern America?

Why did World War I break out?

         Long-run political and economic consequences of the war.

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

Did long-term economic development contain “fault lines” (instability) that led to the Crash and the Depression?

The English East India Company and Trade with India and Asia. 

American History.


This blog covers many of the topics of a college education in economics, political science, business and history. Hopefully, it is a positive externality (useful and free).


For a menu of the essays and posts with links, by topic,

List of Posts by Topic



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Most Popular Posts

Adam Smith's Pin Factory

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Adam Smith - Our Founding Father INTRODUCTION   This essay on Adam Smith and his famous example of a pin factory also serves as an introduction to some of the themes in the over 100 essays in this blog.   Adam Smith wrote the  Wealth of Nations  during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It was published in 1776. The dynamics of the Industrial Revolution continue to be a disruptive force; because of AI, it might be even more disruptive in the future.   ADAM SMITH’S PIN FACTORY   Adam Smith’s description of a pin factory is on the first page of  The Wealth of Nations .  (Chapter 1 – “Of the Division of Labour”)  Drawings of pin factories of this period show workers using hand tools. Smith says the process can be broken down into 18 distinct steps, including packaging the pins. Smith mentions that pin factory workers were poorly paid, despite their high productivity.    Adam Smith says he visited a pin factory empl...
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The Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Beginning of the Great Depression

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Famous Headline     Before You Begin If you don't know the background of this complicated story, you might want to first read a shorter version that introduces some of the key factors explaining the Crash and the Depression. See,   Introduction to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Beginning of the Great Depression     Before reading this essay, I strongly recommend you see the PBS video on YouTube. Type in Stock Market Crash 1929. Look for: US – The Crash of 1929 (PBS), ALLHISTORIES – PLAYLIST.  The documentary is broken into 6 parts to show commercials. Or buy the video on Amazon Prime. Great documentary with wonderful photos, videos, and scenes from movies of the 1920s and the crash. Shows what a crazy time it was.   The video is also a great introduction to Andrew Ross Sorkin's recent best-seller  1929:  Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History - and How It Shattered a Nation.  This book concentrates on the roles played b...
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The English East India Company (EIC): Trade with India and Asia

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The Mughal emperor Shah Alam hands a scroll to Robert Clive, the governor of Bengal, which transferred tax collecting rights in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the East India Company.  Illustration: Benjamin West (1738–1820)/British Library INTRODUCTION   Founded in 1600, the English East India Company (EIC), like its Dutch equivalent the United Netherlands East India Company (VOC, from the Dutch initials) was an innovative new type of corporation. It was a model for the limited-liability, stockholder-owned and funded modern corporation. The EIC and the VOC were early prototypes for the modern multinational corporation. Originally created as a company to develop profitable long-distance trade, the EIC evolved into a political organization that controlled or dominated about two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent by the early 1800s. The EIC and the Navigation Acts were the starting points for England's naval dominance and colonial empire. The large increase in England's income and we...
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Bilateral Oligopoly

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The best movie about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is titled My Darling Clementine. A great western - great cast, great photography.  DEFINITION OF A BILATERAL OLIGOPOLY Models of market structure assume that the demand side is represented by a large number of buyers.  The structure of the market, and the assumed market outcomes, depends on the number of suppliers and how they compete.  Suppliers either post one price or exploit their knowledge of buyer categories by using price discrimination.  Despite the comments about the key role of consumers in determining economic performance, consumers are fairly passive when the discussion focuses on imperfectly-competitive industries.  But many markets along supply chains are not structured this way; the buyers are not passive consumers but large corporations that do not passively accept suppliers’ prices.  Net prices are actively negotiated.  These markets are often bilateral oligopolies. ...
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Josiah Wedgwood, the Wedgwood Pottery Company, and the Beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England

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Wedgwood Anti-Slavery Cameo A better introduction to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution than Adam Smith is the history of Josiah Wedgwood and the Wedgwood Pottery Company. This is how one company actually ushered in the Industrial Revolution. The revolutionary generation that first adopted steam engines saw the following trends and changes: Manufacturing was being modernized by a small group of entrepreneurs. Much of the new raw material processing and manufacturing was concentrated in a small area in the middle of England, away from London. These modernizing entrepreneurs formed a new economic, intellectual and social network. Modernizing entrepreneurs like Wedgwood tended to be members of Dissenting sects (like Quakers) or Nonconformist churches (not members of the Church of England), Whigs (liberals) in politics, and believers in “progress.” They were optimistic about the future, influenced by the ideas of Hume, Rousseau, Locke and Adam Smith. They believed...
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List of Posts By Topic

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POSTS CATEGORIES (POSTS WITH LINKS ARE IN BLUE AND LISTED BELOW) Overview of the Blog   The Beginning of the Modern Global Economy:  The Economic Rise of England Before the Industrial Revolution   The Beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England and America   The theme of the following five sections of the blog is that innovation and information, not price competition, are the main factors for understanding economic growth, competition, market structure and analysis.   Basic Concepts and Theory Corporate Strategies And Management Market Behavior and Structure Market Dynamics and Information:  How Markets Work Economic Theory and Markets   There is beginning a historic change in future populations and their demographics. This will interact with other variables and have a serious, maybe profound, effect on future economic growth. Demographics, Population Projections and Economics American History American Economic History Politics of the United...
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Government Finance 101. Fiscal Policy: Welcome to Alice in Wonderland

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Secretary of the Treasury UPDATE (10/2026) Some general background. Since 2000, the net government debt of America has tripled as a percent (share) of GDP. If the U.S. had to refinance (not reduce) all of its government debt at the current interest rate of a five-year bond, it would need higher taxes or spending cuts equal to 4.7% of GDP. That would cause a recession. Most of the U.S. national debt has to be refinanced in the next five years. Nobody believes yearly deficits will be eliminated or even reduced significantly. One reason is that interest expense is rising. The new (hopeful) goal is that government debt as a percent of GDP will fall over time. In other words, nominal GDP will grow faster than government debt. Possible but unlikely. Even to achieve a stable debt/GDP ratio, the government would have to run a "primary" budget surplus, that is, a budget surplus before interest expense. For the U.S., it would be about 1.0% of GDP (about $300 billion). Instead, the ...
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Explaining Derivatives - An Analogy

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You go around to farmers with cows. You buy all the cows and pay the farmers a small fee to milk the cows and sell the milk. You pay for the cows with ass(et)-backed securities called MBSs (Milked Bovine Securities) that you tell investors are udderly safe. But some of the cows don't give enough milk (cow flow problems) or give no milk at all. You take some of the asset-backed securities, say they're backed by the subprime cows, and use them as collateral to sell another set of securities called CMOs (Cow Milk Obligations). Then you buy CDSs (Cow Dried-up Swaps) from AIG (Angus Insurance Company) to insure the CMOs when the cows stopped giving milk. If you work it right, you collect more on the CDSs than you pay out to retire the CMOs. The money you get from selling the dead cows go to pay the CLOs (cow leather obligations). You could also sell CDOs (cow dung obligations) that depend on how much cow dung is produced. This is a typical Wall Street product - turning s...
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John von Neumann Sees the Future

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John von Neumann JOHN VON NEUMANN CREATES THE FUTURE If you want to understand the world we live in, you have to know about the thinking of three men – Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and John von Neumann.   I’ve talked a little about Alan Turing in an earlier essay.   All three men knew each other, discussed their thinking with each other, and promoted each other’s ideas. John von Neumann has been called the smartest individual of the 20 th Century (by his brother-in-law, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics).   A n outline of von Neumann's accomplishments, which you can read about in  Wikipedia, is hard to believe.   He invented game theory, which I discussed in two earlier posts.   He belonged to a group of mathematicians who invented new statistical techniques at Los Alamos that made the atomic bomb possible. He invented game theory. In 1944, he wrote a memo that outlined the structure of the modern computer.   He then managed the design a...
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The Roman Republic Commits Suicide: A Cautionary Tale for America

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Roman Legion Why Study Rome? Americans have focused on comparisons between Rome and America twice in American history.  The first time was during the period from before the Revolution to after the ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, when the founding fathers and others looked to the Roman Republic for ideas and inspiration on how to structure the new government. After the American Revolution, the founding fathers, having read the Roman authors detailing the collapse of the Roman republic, worried about internal threats to the survival of their new republic.   The second time was when the United States became a superpower, especially after WWII, and then again after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Commentators compared America to the Roman Empire at the height of its power. There was some discussion about how America became a permanent warfare state and how it affected domestic democracy and civil society. ...
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