Atlas Shrugged and Interventionism

What if the Industrial Revolution wasn’t sparked by the steam engine, but by a quiet legal revolution in how England handled property rights? Ben Southwood of Works in Progress argues that the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s unleashed British growth by empowering a Parliament composed of landowners who simplified their own tangled, inefficient property rights.… MORE

In the good old days, dump trucks came in one discrete unit. Nowadays, they pull trailers with as much cubic space as themselves. Once upon a time, buses, too, were constituted in a fairly modest vehicle. Today, they are double their previous size. Half as many drivers are now required to pilot these roadway behemoths.… MORE

Inequality is often the outcome of processes regarded as fair. Yet advantages acquired fairly in one sphere—economic, educational, or political—rarely remain confined to the domain that produced them. As these advantages spill over into other areas, they reshape opportunities and outcomes over time, gradually transforming what began as tolerable disparities into broader patterns of unequal… MORE

Yet the argument of Book V of Wealth of Nations is something quite different. Over hundreds of pages, Smith patiently shows why both peace and a tolerable administration of justice are historically rare, and continually fragile. To the extent that some society or other happens to have them, it seems to be neither the natural… MORE

“Economists have likened free trade to technological progress: although some narrow interests may be harmed, the overall benefits to society are substantial.” The theory of international trade and commercial policy is one of the oldest branches of economic thought. From the ancient Greeks to the present, government officials, intellectuals, and economists have pondered the determinants… MORE

David Ricardo. In a recent article in The Financial Times Nat Dyer argues that economists misunderstand tariffs.1 He points out that tariffs have political and moral dimensions not captured by standard economic reasoning. We therefore take economists’ widespread advocacy of free trade at our peril: “too few economic theorists have interrogated the actual, messy history… MORE

Recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) has long been recognized as one of our most important economic thinkers and a leader of the Chicago school of economics. He is the author of many books and articles in economics, including A Theory of the Consumption Function and A Monetary History… 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

Nobel laureate Ronald H. Coase (1910-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Coase’s articles, “The Problem of Social Cost” and “The Nature of the Firm” are among the most important and most often cited works in the whole of economic literature. Coase recounts how he tried to encourage… MORE

  In 2002, Vernon Smith and daniel kahneman were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Smith received his prize “for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms.” The dominant view among economists as recently as the 1970s was that economists, unlike chemists or biologists,… MORE

Game theory is the science of strategy. It attempts to determine mathematically and logically the actions that “players” should take to secure the best outcomes for themselves in a wide array of “games.” The games it studies range from chess to child rearing and from tennis to takeovers. But the games all share the common… MORE

  John Nash, john harsanyi, and reinhard selten shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics “for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games.” In other words, Nash received the Nobel prize for his work in game theory. Except for one course in economics that he took at Carnegie Institute of Technology… MORE