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We’re bringing back price theory with our series on Price Theory problems with Professor Bryan Cutsinger. You can see all of Cutsinger’s problems and solutions by subscribing to his EconLog RSS feed. Share your proposed solutions in the Comments. Professor Cutsinger will be present in the comments for the next couple of weeks, and we’ll post his .. MORE
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International Trade
Counterfactuals are a necessary part of any scientific analysis: If X didn’t happen, then Y would have. But counterfactuals, by definition, can never be known. They never occurred, so we can never truly know if the counterfactual would have happened. For example, there was much debate in the Truman Administration and the US military during World .. MORE
Labor Market
These tweets caught my eye: I suspect that it would be possible to create some sort of argument that the AI boom is hurting the job market, but at the risk of being unserious I don’t find this one to be particularly persuasive. Suppose I made the following argument: Interest rates would be lower if .. MORE
International Trade
The August 29 planned abolition of the de minimis customs exemption in the United States may come as a shock to those who believe that, as the physical universe is made of visible matter and dark matter, the political world is made of Democratic and Republican stuff, “the Left” and “the Right.” The restriction of .. MORE
Economic Education
Question: Suppose the demand for fentanyl is perfectly inelastic, and that the users of fentanyl steal from others to acquire the money to pay for it. In an effort to crack down on fentanyl use, the government imposes harsher penalties on suppliers of fentanyl, reducing its supply. How will this policy affect the amount of .. MORE
Economic History
Government Should Experiment with Eliminating Patient Barriers, Not with Covering Ozempic by Akiva Malamet, Bautista Vivanco, and Michael F. Cannon, Cato at Liberty, August 11, 2025. Excerpts: While Ozempic and other GLP‑1 drugs are great at helping patients lose weight(among many other promising uses), these impressive medications come with an impressive price tag. For those paying out of .. MORE
Property Rights
Most advanced countries are democracies. In most cases, these countries impose heavy taxes, with total revenues often falling between 30% and 50% of GDP. And yet, most people don’t like paying taxes. How can we explain this seeming contradiction? The mainstream view of both the economics profession and the general public seems to be that .. MORE
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Government Should Experiment with Eliminating Patient Barriers, Not with Covering Ozempic by Akiva Malamet, Bautista Vivanco, and Michael F. Cannon, Cato at Liberty, August 11, 2025. Excerpts: While Ozempic and other GLP‑1 drugs are great at helping patients lose weight(among many other promising uses), these impressive medications come with an impressive price tag. For those paying out of .. MORE
#ReadWithMe
Now that we’ve looked at Musa al-Gharbi’s description of what causes Awokenings to rise and eventually fall, what are the long term consequences of these movements? Given that Awokenings consist of wealthy and elite members of the symbolic capitalist class rising in support of antiracism, feminism, economic equality, and other social justice related causes, it’s .. MORE
International Trade
With all the discussion of free trade, tariffs, and non-tariff barriers, I decided to pick up and quickly skim a short, delightful book by trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati. It’s his 1988 book, titled simply Protectionism. I wrote a short review of the book in the June 5, 1989 issue of Fortune. One of the issues, .. MORE
Book Review of: Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress–and How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman,1; and Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.2 Vera Coking and the Cost of Progress In 1961, Vera Coking and her husband purchased a home in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They paid $20,000 for the modest three-story .. MORE
While informed consent and respect for autonomy govern how health care practitioners interact with their patients, this new ethos is absent when it comes to the government asserting authority over adults’ health decisions. The government dictates what kinds of health professionals adults may consult. It determines what medicines adults may purchase and under which circumstances .. MORE
A Book Review of Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society, by John Hasnas.1 “Look around.” John Hasnas’s main political advice may sound extravagant. But his remarkable book, Common Law Liberalism,1 is a caveat against “inattentional blindness” of the sort social scientists often fall victim to—and those who like flirting with theory .. MORE
“I say that man’s reason is given him by nature in order that he may, by his reason and by his intellect, prevent that suffering which results from the laws of nature, if you take nature without man.”—Annie Besant. 1 Introduction “The dramatic episode that clarified the difference between classical political economy and Darwin’s biology .. MORE
I hadn't considered the immigration angle--I like it! -Bryan
Bryan Cutsinger, August 4