Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done

going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is May 29th, 2024, and my guest is economist Michael Munger of Duke University.

This is Mike's 47th, yes, 47th appearance on Econ Talk,

which is roughly once every 20 episodes, or a little over twice a year.

Mike was last year in September of 2023 talking about Adam Smith and the trolley problem.

Mike, welcome back to Econ Talk.

It's a pleasure, Russ, thank you.

Our topic for today is government failure

based on a paper of yours, co-authored with William Keach.

Bill Keach was a friend of both of ours

who has sadly since passed away.

Your title is a riff on an older paper about market failure.

Market failure is a term that's used frequently by economists. I thought we might start there and talk about what market failure is and what you're trying to

How you're trying to respond to that?

Yeah, let me say something about how we came to this.

As you said, Bill Keach was a mutual friend of ours.

We actually, the three of us got together once, I think think at the southern meetings and had some very nice Scotch during the conference

I'm very sad that I did not get a picture of you and Bill together. It wouldn't quite be Friedman and Stigl

but it would be close. Bill was six foot eight. Yes. Shockingly tall in fact

Bill and I used to carpool to Duke and surprisingly the car that Bill had was a Mini Cooper. Now the reason

he had a Mini Cooper was that the seat would go the front seat would go all the

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