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We trace a straight line from a 1697 blasphemy execution to modern cancel culture by focusing on one variable: the cost of turning speech into coordinated punishment. We break down how social media creates common knowledge at near-zero cost, making outrage faster, bigger, and harder to control.
• Thomas Aikenhead’s case as a story about information and enforcement costs
• Transaction costs as the hidden limiter on persecution and social punishment
• The First Amendment limiting state coercion while leaving private sanctions intact
• Social media as a collapse in the cost of broadcasting accusations
• Common knowledge as the trigger for coordinated action by strangers
• Justine Sacco as the early template for modern cancellation dynamics
• Brendan Eich, Emmanuel Cafferty, James Damore, and PyCon “donglegate” as repeating patterns
• John Cleese on offense and the urge to control others’ behavior
• Listener letters on healthcare markets, consolidation, and transaction costs
• Certificate of need laws and price systems that shape competition

• Amy Poehler's super bowl ad (Dongle!):
• John Cleese on cancel culture

Letters:

• Dr. Anthony Digiorgio, UCSF, Graphic Novel Claim Denied, Off Label Ideas
• Surgery Center of Oklahoma

Book-o-da-week:

• Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life Scribner, 2025.

You can follow Mike Munger on Twitter at @mungowitz

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We tell a story about German academic quarter hours-- akademische Viertel-- and use it to argue that lateness is an economics problem of coordination, incentives, and transaction costs, not just manners. We lay out five rules that predict who shows up late, why the pattern spreads, and how to spot it before you commit to a recurring meeting.
• the “academic quarter hour” as a rule that makes lateness predictable
• lateness as a transaction cost that blocks group goals
• platonic travelers and the habit of leaving no buffer
• five rules of lateness and what each predicts
• why meetings drift into equilibrium lateness over time
• lateness as an externality and prisoner’s dilemma
• incentive fixes from social sanctions to financial penalties
• watch setting quirks and backwards induction as a practical test
• listener letter on medical insurance hiding prices from consumers
• why hospitals were small before 1935 and how sulfa drugs changed that
• letter on permitting payments for solar projects and why people call them bribes
• book recommendation for the punctually challenged

Links:

• Munger, Chron of Higher Ed, 5 Rules of Lateness in Academe
• Munger, Econlib, The 5 Sorry Rules of Lateness
• New York Times article on "Time Personality"
• U of Michigan's version of the academic quarter hour
  
  

Book-o-da-week: Never Be Late Again: 7 Cures for the Punctually Challenged
by Diana DeLonzor and Gerry DeLonzor. Post Madison Publishing May 19, 2026.

You can follow Mike Munger on Twitter at @mungowitz

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We try to make sense of a real problem many of us feel: paying a lot for U.S. healthcare while still waiting months to see a doctor. We trace how engineered transaction costs, from the Flexner Report to modern residency caps, restrict physician supply and protect price power while leaving clinicians overworked and patients stuck.
• getting “fired” by a health system and what it reveals about access
• why shortages don’t clear when prices rise, and how transaction costs block entry
• the Flexner Report as quality reform and supply restriction
• evidence of conflicts of interest and rushed methods behind the Flexner narrative
• Ruben Kessel’s puzzle on persistent price discrimination in medicine
• hospital privileges and county medical societies as cartel discipline
• why advertising bans and professional norms can function as anti-competition tools
• how residency caps and accreditation keep the bottleneck in place today
• a listener letter on data center payments as compensation versus bribes
• book of the week recommendation and a few parting thoughts

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As I note in the episode, thanks to Dr. Lance Stell, Davidson College Department of Philosophy (emeritus). Lance offered this note about the epidsode:

There's a footnote to the Flexner report. It killed the Davidson medical college - NC"s first. The school was founded by a DC faculty as a proprietary school. After 10 years operating on campus, it moved to Charlotte where it had a clinical relationship w/ the Good Samaritan Hospital - a black hospital, becoming the first medical school in the country to have such a relationship. I can send you an article about it written by Dr. Eddie Hoover, MD, a surgeon and Editor of NC"s black medical journal. Flexner execrated proprietary medical schools and it was his goal to "close them." His damning review of the Davidson medical School, renamed The NC Medical College, was successful.

Thanks, Lance, I did not know that! I added that link, below.

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Links:

• The infamous Flexner Report: http://archive.carnegiefoundation.org/publications/pdfs/elibrary/Carnegie_Flexner_Report.pdf
• Hiatt and Stockton on the Flexner Report: "The Impact of the Flexner Report on the Fate of Medical Schools in North America After 1909"
• Hiatt: "Around the Continent in 180 Days."
• Hiatt: "The Amazing Logistics of Flexner's Fieldwork."
• Kessell, Journal of Law and Economics, 1958: "Price Discrimination in Medicine."
• Eddie L Hoover, Catherine R Lewis. 2006. Journal of the National Medical Association. "Good Samaritan Hospital and the North Carolina Medical College circa early 1900: the first major affiliation between a black hospital and a white medical college."
• Ernest Jones, "The God complex" in Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis.

Earliest source I could find for the TWEJ: https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/old89/godplay.840.html

PA data center story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/pennsylvania/article_3b615fd8-5d36-45c4-bfb6-4a3162104f0b.html

Book-o-da-week: Daniel Hannan, Inventing Freedom, Broadside Press. https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Freedom-English-Speaking-Peoples-Modern/dp/006223174X/

You can follow Mike Munger on Twitter at @mungowitz