Compound Rates of Growth In the modern version of an old legend, an investment banker asks to be paid by placing one penny on the first square of a chessboard, two pennies on the second square, four on the third, etc. If the banker had asked that only the white squares be used, the initial […]
The Library of Economics and Liberty carries the popular Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, edited by David R. Henderson.
This highly acclaimed economics encyclopedia was first published in 1993 under the title The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. It features easy-to-read articles by over 150 top economists, including Nobel Prize winners, over 80 biographies of famous economists, and many tables and charts illustrating economics in action. With David R. Henderson’s permission and encouragement, the Econlib edition of this work includes links, additions, and corrections.
Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, “socialism” and “communism” were synonyms. Both referred to economic systems in which the government owns the means of production. The two terms diverged in meaning largely as a result of the political theory and practice of Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). Like most contemporary socialists, Lenin believed that socialism could not […]
Should a truck driver earn more than a telephone operator, or an engineer more than a librarian? Questions like these are largely resolved in the labor market by the forces of supply and demand. Proponents of comparable worth, however, challenge the resulting pattern of wages by arguing that occupations dominated by female workers are paid […]
Minimum wage laws set legal minimums for the hourly wages paid to certain groups of workers. In the United States, amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act have increased the federal minimum wage from $.25 per hour in 1938 to $5.15 in 1997.1 Minimum wage laws were invented in Australia and New Zealand with the […]
Businesses complain about regulation incessantly, but many citizens, consumer advocates, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) think it absolutely necessary to protect the public interest. What is regulation? Why do we have it? How has it changed? This article briefly provides some answers, concentrating on experience with regulation in the United States. Regulation consists of requirements the […]
These entries are about real markets and how they work and include advertising, brand names, competition, entrepreneurship, and the free market.
Governments impose a variety of taxes. The analysis of taxes, therefore, requires multiple entries, including marginal tax rates, corporate taxation, and capital gains taxes.
Partly because of the economy-wide effects of money and banking, and partly because of the specific government policies that regulate the money supply and banking, there is a separate category to cover those issues. The entries include bank runs, the Federal Reserve system, and the Savings and Loan crisis.
With extensive government regulation of many industries, there are many entries on aspects of that regulation, in industries ranging from agriculture, airlines, and energy tp trucking and pharmaceuticals.
Separately but almost simultaneously with William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger, French economist Leon Walras developed the idea of marginal utility and is thus considered one of the founders of the “marginal revolution.” But Walras’s biggest contribution was in what is now called general equilibrium theory. Before Walras, economists had made little attempt to show […]
From the mid-1970s until his death in 1990, Ludwig Lachmann played a central role in reinvigorating interest in the Austrian School as a viable alternative to the reigning neoclassical approach to economic analysis. He, along with Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner, helped foster a revival that continues to this day and owes much to Lachmann’s […]