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Why Protect a Rich South Korea from a Nuclear North Korea?

As if Washington was not busy enough internationally, serious Korea analysts wonder if Northeast Asia could erupt in flames. North Korea is rewriting its constitution to drop plans for peaceful reunification with the Republic of Korea, declaring the South to be the North’s “primary foe and invariable principal enemy.” Worse, Pyongyang celebrated the approach of .. MORE

Book Review, Kling's Corner

Complacent or Pathological?

They have made us more risk averse and more set in our ways, more segregated, and they have sapped us of the pioneer spirit that made America the world’s most productive and innovative economy. Furthermore, all this has happened at a time when we may need American dynamism more than ever before. —Tyler Cowen, The .. MORE

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In Praise of Debt

We often hear that it’s a bad idea to take on large debts or even to get into debt at all. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” says Polonius to his son Laertes in one of the most famous passages from Hamlet. Polonius’s reason for avoiding borrowing is that it “dulls the edge of .. MORE

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Liberty

A Victory for Freedom of Choice

By David Henderson

Industry Interviews: Individuals at Work

Voices from Gaza (with Ahmed Alkhatib)

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

My Weekly Reading and Viewing for March 17, 2024.

By David Henderson

Central Planning

Definitions and the Euphemism Treadmill

By Kevin Corcoran

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Star Trek: Markets on the Edge

By Akiva Malamet

Politics and Economics

You Cannot Prioritize Everything

By Scott Sumner

Regulation and Subsidies

Looking Back At COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes

By David Henderson

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

Living with Exponential Change (with Azeem Azhar)

The world of today would seem alien to someone living 30 years ago: people seduced by their screens in private and public and now AI blurring the lines between humans and the machine. Author and technologist Azeem Azhar chronicles the pace of change and asks whether the human experience can cope with that pace while .. MORE

econtalk-podcast

Roya Hakakian on A Beginner’s Guide to America

Author and poet Roya Hakakian talks about her latest book, A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Hakakian was born in Iran and came to the United States as a 19 year-old, not speaking any English, and carrying only the things she could stuff in her backpack. She tells .. MORE

EconLog

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Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Star Trek: Markets on the Edge

In my previous post, I discussed why Star Trek’s Federation, despite its calls for peaceful diversity, fell just a bit short of their aim. In this post, I switch gears from culture and ideology to economics. In the Federation, most goods and services are produced via replication. The need for production and trade via the .. MORE

Central Planning

Definitions and the Euphemism Treadmill

I posted recently about how some people try to use definitions to shortcut discussion about various issues. This is closely related to an idea Steven Pinker calls the “euphemism treadmill.” In short, this describes how people attempt to relabel ideas or concepts to improve their appeal. The process was once explained in the following way .. MORE

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“John Stuart Mill: Traditional and Revisionist Interpretations”

By John N. Gray

The traditional interpretation pictures John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) as one of history’s paradigmatic transitional thinkers. Situated uncertainly in a no-man’s land between the rival intellectual traditions of nineteenth-century England, Mill in his writings displays no settled or coherent doctrine on social and political questions. In Mill’s work, the received view contends, competing sympathies and commitments .. MORE

Selected Essays on Political Economy

By Frédéric Bastiat

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman, and author. He led the free-trade movement in France from its inception in 1840 until his untimely death in 1850. The first 45 years of his life were spent in preparation for five tremendously productive years writing in favor of freedom. Bastiat was the founder of the .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

Rejecting the Culture Transplant

By Arnold Kling

A book review of The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left, by Garett Jones.1 In January of 2018, President Donald Trump disparaged taking in immigrants from “[expletive] countries.” Equally dramatically, albeit more politely, in the conclusion to his recent book, The Culture Transplant,1 Garett .. MORE

It Was All So Unlikely: Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope

By Mark C. Schug

A review of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the American Story by Wilfred McClay.1 American history isn’t what it used to be. Once it was common for a history textbook author to tell a good story. I remember as an eighth-grade student being horrified that my teacher was going to toss out a bunch .. MORE

Conversations

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A Conversation with Gary S. Becker

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 Conversation with Milton Friedman

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

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College Economics Topics

Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.

Economist Biographies

From the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Basic Concepts, Economic Regulation, Economics of Legal Issues

Liability

Until the 1980s, property and liability insurance was a small cost of doing business. But the substantial expansion in what legally constitutes liability has greatly increased the cost of liability insurance for personal injuries. The plight of the U.S. private aircraft industry illustrates the extent of these liability costs. Although accident rates for general aviation .. MORE

Basic Concepts, Macroeconomics

Recessions

One of the most popular definitions of recessions is that they are periods when real gross national product (GNP) has declined for at least two consecutive quarters. In 1990, real GNP declined between the third and fourth quarters and again between the fourth quarter of 1990 and the first quarter of 1991. Hence, there is .. MORE

Corporations and Financial Markets , Economics of Legal Issues, Government Policy

Corporate Governance

The governance of corporations encompasses a wide range of checks and balances that affect the monitoring and incentives of firms’ management. Sound corporate governance is particularly important when a firm’s managers are not the owners. Without appropriate corporate governance, nonowner managers might not work very hard to maximize profits for shareholders and instead might spend .. MORE

Quotes

Despite the coercion of government, markets are irrepressible because they express the elemental urge of ordinary people to come together as buyers and sellers. “Corrigible Capitalism, Incorrigible Socialism”

-Arthur Seldon

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. Frederic Bastiat, The Law

-Frederic Bastiat Full Quote >>

In every country, it always is and must always be the interest f the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest, that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; not could it ever have been called into ...

-Adam Smith Full Quote >>