Featured Post
Related Post
People who distinguish “human costs” from “economic costs” are either making an ideological statement or don’t understand what economic theory usefully calls a cost. Just to quote one example: a Financial Times columnist mentions, as if it goes without saying, the “economic, military and human costs” of further confrontation with the Iranian rulers (“Israel Has .. MORE
Featured Comment
Economics and Culture
There have been some interesting developments with NPR recently. A long time veteran of the organization, Uri Berliner, wrote an essay lamenting that the organization has gone from and admittingly left-leaning but still rigorous and fair journalistic enterprise to a politically driven monoculture that lets ideology drive its reporting. NPR, he says, no longer facilitates .. MORE
Price Controls
California has some of the strictest insurance regulations in the country. It is the only state where insurers are not allowed to base their rate hikes on catastrophe models — forward-looking calculations of risk — or the rising cost of reinsurance premiums, according to both Zimmerman and the Department of Insurance. Under current regulations, insurers are only .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
Serious arguments, economic and moral, exist to justify the state (the central and sovereign apparatus of government). Serious objections to these arguments also exist. It is interesting to note that most people, including most economists, ignore both kinds. I thought about this when I read the funny factoid reported by the Wall Street Journal about .. MORE
Economics and Culture
Wisconsin comedian Charlie Berens has a great routine about 4-way stops in the Midwest. Midwest drivers are so nice and obsequious that they’ll endlessly wave the other guy on at the stop sign, even when they were there first and have the right-of-way. Like all good comedy, it’s funny because it’s at least a little .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Political and moral philosophy are related to economics, and even less stealthily to the older political economy. The economist cannot recommend a government policy without making or accepting a value judgment consistent with who is going to be helped and who will be harmed. At least, he must believe that the policy falls within the .. MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
The Financial Times has an interesting interview with Esther Duflo, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019. She argues that developed nations have a moral duty to compensate poor countries for the damage done by carbon emissions: If you combine these three numbers, you get basically the money value of the cost .. 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
Jessamine Chan’s 2022 novel The School for Good Mothers (New York: Simon & Schuster) constructs a bureaucratic dystopia in which unfit parents—mostly mothers, but not all—are ordered by family courts into a re-education camp run by Child Protective Services. Perhaps the most chilling part of the narrative is how easy it is to imagine a .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Years ago, I read Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty by Muhammad Yunus. In the book, Yunus describes the origins and purpose of the Grameen Bank. This bank specializes in offering small loans to people in poverty to help them begin to attain self-sufficiency. This isn’t a charitable organization – .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Political and moral philosophy are related to economics, and even less stealthily to the older political economy. The economist cannot recommend a government policy without making or accepting a value judgment consistent with who is going to be helped and who will be harmed. At least, he must believe that the policy falls within the .. MORE
A Liberty Classics Book Review of Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order, by Anthony de Jasay.1 We cannot be against politics, especially in a democratic regime; isn’t that obvious? In his 1997 book Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order, Anthony de Jasay led a frontal charge against this commonly accepted idea. He argued .. MORE
It would help if people would put their electronic devices away from the center of their existences and pick up a book. —George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility (p. 2)1 Contemporary political debates take place on Twitter, with participants choosing topics that inspire the most outrage at the moment. If people pick up George Will’s .. MORE
Book Review of The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World, by Samuel Gregg.1 In The Next American Economy (2022), Samuel Gregg provides a refreshing defense of free markets, emphasizing the need to frame the case for economic liberty within a broader narrative about America’s values and identity. We need this .. MORE
A Book Review of Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall.1 It’s been over 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. Ever since those horrible attacks, the United States government has been waging a “war on terror” both at home and abroad. The war on .. MORE
So exactly which *half the country* has no access to political power via elections? Please specify. If states had been successful in their efforts to kick Trump off their 2024 ballots, we would have had..
MarkW, April 22