animal ethics, chick culling, civil discourse, Display Test, efficiency, grandstanding, posturing, R. R. Reno
Book Review
Book Review of The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy. Ryan A. Bourne, Ed.1 Price controls have grown increasingly common across large sectors of the economy such as finance and healthcare, especially in the wake of laws like Dodd-Frank and Obamacare. President Biden’s recent cap on credit .. MORE
Book Review
A Book Review of Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze.1 Liberties, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “depend on the silence of the law.” Nowadays the law is very chatty. Here are three examples from the new book by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze, Over Ruled: .. MORE
Book Review, Liberty Classics
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory, by James M. Buchanan.1 In less than one hundred pages, James Buchanan excoriates economists—classical and modern—for their unrecognized confusions about cost. More than an insular academic debate, Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory develops a biting set of logical .. MORE
International Trade
Economics of Crime
Political Economy
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Economic and Political Philosophy
Cross-country Comparisons
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Liberty
econtalk-podcast
Why are European cities charming and American cities often so charmless? Simple, says urbanist Alain Bertaud: most American cities are zoned for single-family housing. The result is not enough customers within walking distance of a business, and not enough parking for the customers who drive. Why American cities are zoned that way is related to culture .. MORE
econtalk-extra
If you’ve been paying any attention to EconTalk over the last few months, you know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is very much on host Russ Roberts’ mind. This episode may end up being the most frightening of them all, as Russ welcomes Eliezer Yudkowsky, a Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and an .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
For any science to be broadly understood, it needs to be communicated in a helpful manner. Indeed, much of my research focuses on how experts communicate their opinions and on the institutions under which that communication is improved. In this post, I turn my eye toward another form of expert opinion, the law. With law, .. MORE
Cross-country Comparisons
Josh Hendrickson has a new Substack post that discusses the implications of the US dollar’s role as an international reserve currency. This caught my eye: When you are taught a typical model of international trade with flexible exchange rates, discussion of the balance of trade goes something like this. If a country runs persistent trade .. MORE
Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.
For a long time now the theory of capital has been under a cloud. Twenty years ago, when Professor Knight launched his attack on the capital theories of Boehm-Bawerk and Wicksell, there opened a controversy which continued for years on both sides of the Atlantic. Today very little is heard of all this. The centre .. MORE
Definition of the Science.– We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy. Our readers must be aware that that term has often been used in a much wider .. MORE
In 1936, seven years into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was published. The culmination of Keynes’ theorizing in support of policies of manipulation of money and credit by the state in order to achieve macroeconomic equilibrium came with that book. A central bank, in that context, became .. MORE
A book review of The Wealth of Refugees: How Displaced People Can Build Economies by Alexander Betts (Oxford University Press, 2021)1 A key idea in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is that people have a persistent and ever-present drive to “better their own conditions”. Leave people alone, and prosperity and other improvements of life .. MORE
VIDEO
Gary Becker (1930-2014) was one of the most original and pathbreaking economists of modern times. His 1992 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences was described as his “having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behavior.” Becker’s early work on discrimination led to his further work .. MORE
VIDEO
A professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and a primary figure in Chicago School Economics and in the field of Law and Economics, Harold Demsetz has contributed original research on the theory of the firm, regulation in markets, industrial organization, antitrust policy, transaction costs, externalities, and .. MORE
Econlib Videos
Conversations with some of the most original thinkers of our time
The Reading Lists by Topic pages contain some suggested readings organized by topic, including materials available on Econlib. Brief reviews or descriptions are included for many items.
Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.
These free resources are appropriate for teachers of high school and AP economics, social studies, and history classes. They are also appropriate for interested students, home schoolers, and newcomers to the topic of economics.
“Law and economics,” also known as the economic analysis of law, differs from other forms of legal analysis in two main ways. First, the theoretical analysis focuses on efficiency. In simple terms, a legal situation is said to be efficient if a right is given to the party who would be willing to pay the .. MORE
A patent is the government grant of monopoly on an invention for a limited amount of time. Patents in the United States are granted for seventeen years from the date the patent is issued or for 20 years from the date of filing. Other countries grant patents for similar time periods. Italy and Mexico grant .. MORE
A tariff is a fancy word for a tax. The term usually refers to import duties, which are fees levied on goods entering one country from another. Import tariffs have been a controversial feature of domestic politics, international diplomacy, and economic policy for centuries. This article covers some of the basic economics of tariffs as .. MORE
-Jean-Baptiste Say
-Adam Smith Full Quote >>
-Frederic Bastiat Full Quote >>