EconLog Archive
Free Markets
Problems with Progressivism and Populism
Over time, ideologies can evolve in unforeseen ways. Consider the following four public policy developments: 1. The Biden administration has attempted to forgive many student loans for college education.2. Several cities in California have imposed rent controls.3. Florida recently banned lab grown meat.4. North Carolina is attempting to ban mask wearing in public. While the .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
Are You a Product?
We should be careful about words, expressions, and catchphrases, especially those political hyperboles that buttress the statist zeitgeist of our time. You are a product of greedy corporations. The author of the May 16 Economist newsletter “The World in Brief” says it in passing: Walmart’s ad operation is much smaller than that of Amazon, which .. MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
My Weekly Reading for May 19, 2024
Brickbat: Robot’s Day of Rest by Charles Oliver, Reason, May 10, 2024. Excerpt: A German court has ruled that the robots at the Tegut supermarket chain must be given Sundays off, just like human workers. Under German law, retail stores must close on Sundays and Christian holidays in order to give employees a day of rest. Tegut .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Beneath the Mask
In his book Minority Report, H.L. Mencken writes: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel [sic] to foreign parts.” With a .. MORE
Family Economics
Population and Density
Chicago’s population is down about 25% from its peak back in 1950. That statement might conjure up images of empty blocks of homes, as you see in Detroit. In fact, Chicago remains quite crowded. I cannot find the article, but I recall reading that Chicago now has more households than ever before. Average household size .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
“Junk Fees” Typically Serve an Important Purpose
Charging extra for specific preferences, such as a seat selection on a flight, enables lower basic prices, increasing access to no-frills options for lower-income customers, while allowing businesses to customize their services to individual customers’ preferences. Airlines unbundle in-flight food and checked bags, for example, leading to more profit opportunities and lower base fares. .. MORE
Adam Smith
Professor Hugh H. Macaulay: A Tribute on His Centennial
Click-a-ty-clack, click-a-ty-clack . . ., click-a-ty-clack. Those were the sounds that regularly echoed down the second-floor hallway of Clemson University’s Sirrine Hall in the 1980s and before. Those sounds of metal-on-metal could be expected by the economists on the floor at 10:00 in the morning, carrying a clear message: “Time for coffee!” The sounds .. MORE
Austrian Economics
My Life as an Austrian Economist: My Philosophical Vision and the Critique of Scientism
As with any tale, it is useful to begin at the beginning. And in my instance, all my beginnings related to Austrian economics are found at Grove City College. How I ended up at Grove City is an extremely unlikely journey with zigs and zags, the probability of which defies all calculation. I was not .. MORE
Labor Mobility, Immigration, Outsourcing
The Actual “Great Replacement”
Some people on the right worry that immigration will cause America’s white population to be largely replaced by non-whites. This hypothesis is sometimes referred to as “The Great Replacement”. There is a great replacement occurring, but these worriers have things exactly backwards. (As an aside, this post will not examine the pros and cons of .. MORE
Economics of Crime
How Drug Prohibition Increases the Rate of Crime
This is the fourth in my series on the social costs of drug prohibition. You can read part one here (prison-industrial complex), part two (police militarization) here, and part three (civil asset forfeiture). Prohibition policies are often sold to a willing public on the grounds of crime reduction. This is especially true regarding the .. MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
Some of the Awful Effects of Price Controls on Oil
Because the price control system was incomplete in that it didn’t cover every part of the U.S. oil market, the price controls were rarely binding. When they were, in the winter of 1972–1973, winter of 1973–1974, and early 1979, shortages occurred. During the rest of the 10 years, the price controls and entitlements program .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Free Markets Against Discrimination on eBay
I live in Alabama, where college football is the major religion. The two major denominations are the University of Alabama Crimson Tide and the Auburn University Tigers. They have fought a storied and ludicrously overwrought rivalry since 1893, except for the four-decade gap between 1907 and 1948 when they didn’t play one another because the .. MORE
Business Economics
Who Makes a Promise
Another day, another labor market intervention! Recently, the Biden administration has announced new rules regarding overtime pay and salaried employees. Generally, salaried employees are paid a flat rate, not paid by the hour, and as such don’t get traditional overtime pay. But legislators have decided that lower-paid salaried workers should also get overtime pay. This .. MORE
Money and Inflation
The War on Prices
Co-blogger David Henderson usefully mentioned the publication of an interesting book edited by Ryan Bourne, The War on Prices. The authors, of which I am honored to be part, also include Brian Albrecht, Pedro Aldighieri, Nicholas Anthony, David Beckworth, Ryan Bourne, Eamonn Butler, Vanessa Brown Calder, Michael Cannon, Jeffrey Clemens, Bryan Cutsinger, Alex Edmans, Peter Jaworski, .. MORE
International Trade
Let’s Hope that Tariffs are Inflationary
David Henderson has an excellent post on the effect of tariffs on the price level. I agree with his analysis, but here I’ll reframe the debate in a way that I hope will also be helpful. Let’s begin with a few propositions: 1. Under the vast majority of policy regimes, the imposition of tariffs leads .. MORE
Media Watch
The Alchemy of Military Expenditure
There may be a charitable way to interpret the following Wall Street Journal statement in a report on Mr. Putin’s replacement of his defense minister (“Russia’s Putin Replaces Defense Minister in Security Shake-Up,” May 12, 2014): Military spending, which has surged to over 6% of gross domestic product this year, up from 2.6% before the .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Ryan Bourne’s Supremacy
The quantity of rent-controlled apartments demanded thus becomes enormous. In New York City, some old rent-controlled units have become family heirlooms. A woman went viral on TikTok in 2021 after showcasing her redecorated $1,300 a month rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, after inheriting the lease from her parents—a unit that would .. MORE
International Trade
Tariffs Do Cause a Slight Temporary Increase in Inflation
Don Boudreaux writes: Unlike you who find Duncan Braid’s May 6th harangue against supporters of free trade “devastating,” I find it to be tendentious. Braid writes triumphantly as if he’s caught us free traders in yet another of our Keystone Kops antics – specifically here, our effort to blame tariffs for inflation. Yet no competent .. MORE
Technology
Visions of the 21st century
Niels Bohr once said: “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” I say: Prediction is not about the future, it’s about the present. Now that I’m fairly old, I can look back on a wide range of visions of the 21st century, many of which now seem obsolete. Here are just a .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
My Reading Highlights for Week of May 12
First, Happy Mothers’ Day. Trump Promised To ‘Drain the Swamp.’ He Did the Opposite. By John Stossel, Reason, May 8, 2024. Excerpt: In 2020, then-President Trump said he was succeeding: “We’re draining the Washington swamp!” But it’s not true. “He made government bigger,” Economist Ed Stringham says in my new video. ‘That’s going in the wrong direction. .. MORE
International Trade
Biden Is Really Trump 2.0, Not Surprisingly
According to press reports, the Biden administration is on the verge of announcing a quadrupling of the customs tariff (a tax on American importers) on EVs made in China. He may also announce other Trumpian tariffs (“Biden to Quadruple Tariffs on Chinese EVs,” Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2024). That would not be surprising. In .. MORE