Featured Post
Related Post
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
Featured Comment
Uncategorized
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. Yes, .. MORE
Adam Smith
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
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
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
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
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
Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.
Bloggers David Henderson, Alberto Mingardi, Scott Sumner, Pierre Lemieux, Kevin Corcoran, and guests write on topical economics of interest to them, illuminating subjects from politics and finance, to recent films and cultural observations, to history and literature.
Browse our archive of posts by author last nameBooks: Reviews and Suggested Readings
First, Happy Cinco de Mayo. Now to the content. Backpage: A Blueprint for Squelching Speech by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason, April 29, 2024. Excerpt: From the beginning, this prosecution has been premised on a bogus rationale (authorities yammer on about sex trafficking though none of the defendants are charged with sex trafficking), overreaching in its scope (attempting .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
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
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Michael Crichton once highlighted an unusual quirk in human thinking – something he called Gell-Mann Amnesia, after his friend Murray Gell-Mann. Chrichton said: Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read .. MORE
… digital media not only enhance information exchange and render offline life obsolete—they also reverse literacy and retrieve orality. … This book is about orality, which once was obsolesced by writing, and about literacy, which is now becoming obsolesced by digital media. —Andrey Mir, Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s .. MORE
[t]he idea of decline consists of two distinct traditions. For every Western intellectual who dreads the collapse of his own society (like Henry Adams or Arnold Toynbee or Paul Kennedy or Charles Murray), there is another who has looked forward to the event with glee. —Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History1 In .. MORE
Under a gold standard, government bonds are nearly free of inflation risk but not of default risk. Under a fiat standard, the reverse is true. ——White, Lawrence H. Better Money: Gold Fiat or Bitcoin? (pp. 214-215).1 In his new book, Lawrence H. White compares three possible monetary systems: a gold standard, a fiat money standard, .. MORE
Most students of political philosophy have had some contact with Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (ASU)1—specifically Part II. And for good reasons. Part II is essential, not only because it sets out devastating critiques of competing moral-political doctrines but also because it awakens our deepest intuitions about the coercion required to make those doctrines .. MORE
Populists on both the left and the right continually whine about stagnant living standards. Just imagine the boost to living standards if working class people could buy a high quality electric car for $10,000!
Scott Sumner, May 15