Asymmetric Accountability

What can Tom Cruise’s last impossible mission teach us about usefulness in the digital age? Aled Maclean-Jones argues that dangling from cargo planes, soldering hard drives, and skydiving nineteen consecutive times is really an extended tribute to embodied knowledge. Listen as MacLean-Jones and EconTalk’s Russ Roberts analyze the unique concept of competence presented in Cruise’s films. Along the way, they cover London cabbies who… MORE

It was a fact universally acknowledged that a young man or woman in 1800s Lancashire could find gainful employment as a weaving apprentice. In the pre-factory cottage industry, a weaving family would typically own one handloom. With the dawn of mechanised wool spinning, plenty of jobs became available for the young and willing to upskill.… MORE

The United States, like most other countries, use a method of double-entry accounting to track certain aggregate statistics known as National Income Accounting. One of the statistics tracked is the balance of trade. The balance of trade reports the difference between imports and exports. When imports exceed exports, we are said to have a trade… MORE

It was Don Lavoie, not Friedrich Hayek, who coined the term “knowledge problem” in his seminal 1985 National Economic Planning: What Is Left?1 (itself a more accessible and policy-focused distillation of Lavoie’s thesis, under Israel Kirzner, entitled Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered). Lavoie reformulated and clarified the knowledge problem as developed… MORE

For Smith, moral philosophy is the study of virtue and the faculty of mind that allows us to determine what is praise- or blameworthy conduct. When we understand the project of the moral sentiments, we can see that Smith adopts the same logic in his analysis of political economy. Political economy provides a lens through… MORE

James Buchanan This is Part I of a two-part essay: The Past, Present, and Future of Public Choice: Part I The Past, Present, and Future of Public Choice: Part II Sixty years ago, the Public Choice Society was founded by Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan, nearly coincident with the publication of their jointly authored book,… MORE

Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Universally respected as one of the founders of the economics of public choice, he is the author of numerous books and hundreds of articles in the areas of public finance, public choice, constitutional economics, and economic… MORE

A five-part short video series on the life and contemporary relevance of Adam Smith. This video series, produced by AdamSmithWorks, can be watch as a full 38-minute feature, or in five thematic, classroom-friendly chunks. To access all, click here.   Below are some discussion prompts related to this video:   Part 1: The Invisible Hand… MORE

Recognized as one of the most influential voices in the areas of market structure, the theory of the firm, law and economics, resource unemployment, and monetary theory and policy, in this 2001 interview, Armen Alchian (1914-2013) outlines the “UCLA tradition” of economics which he founded and explores the many unanticipated consequences of self-seeking individual behavior.… MORE

Anne O. Krueger Introduction As an American economist studying international trade and protectionism, Anne Krueger had her own method: she traveled to poorer countries to talk, not just to government officials, but also to businesspeople in those countries. She also often asked to see the businesses’ books, not just the books that they prepared for… MORE

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… MORE

[Editor’s note: this article was written in 1992.]   The development experiences of Third World countries since the fifties have been staggeringly diverse—and hence very informative. Forty years ago the developing countries looked a lot more like each other than they do today. Take India and South Korea. By any standards, both countries were extremely… MORE