By Arnold Kling
Every line trending upward, every drop in cost, every additional ounce of efficiency we can squeeze from a bundle of inputs is the product of deliberate effort—of thousands of workers, engineers, factory managers, and line supervisors redesigning products, rearranging facto...
By J.P. Bastos
Any book that intends to provide a complete account of a chapter covering almost 70 years in the history of ideas is an ambitious achievement by itself, especially when it is centered around a fuzzy concept like neoliberalism. If such a book also attempts to cover decades o...
By Peter Calcagno and Beatriz Maldonado
Beginning on July 1, 2020, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) superseded the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as the trade deal among the three countries.1 Unlike NAFTA, which only included a transparency provision, the USMCA contains specific me...
By Vincent Geloso
Economists like blackboards. Using chalk (or markers), they construct logically consistent abstractions of the world. They call them “models”. This invites derision from both academics and the general public. However, the abstractions are often tested against the ...
By Arnold Kling
Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people's heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers. We tend to refer to these intangibles as know-how, institutional memory, or tacit knowledge. They are embodied by an ex...
By Richard B. McKenzie
I watch a lot of nature documentaries. I’m not very choosy about the animals covered, whether whales, moles, lions, ants, chameleons, blowfish, or mosquitoes. I’m even fascinated by footage of bacteria under a microscope. I’m usually immersed as I sit in front of...
By Anthony Gill
Who defines and enforces property rights? If you are the average person, an undergraduate student, or even a mainstream economics professor, that answer is easy: the government. Look it up! Municipal and county governments determine the deeds to your property and vario...
By Arnold Kling
A central argument of this book is that episodes involving mass violence that contribute to an atmosphere of social unrest and political instability are likely to increase national elites' willingness to invest in primary education in order to prevent future threats...
By Vlad Tarko
One common criticism of capitalism is that it has sparked an epidemic of loneliness. This is often attributed to the individualistic nature of capitalism, and to the fact that markets have replaced a variety of more personal and communal connections with commercial acti...
By Art Carden
Book Review of Poverty, By America, by Matthew Desmond.1 I had not planned to read this book. I found the author's essay on the history of American capitalism for the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project badly wanting, so I passed over Poverty, By America, ...