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An Economist Looks at Europe
At the 2017 Regional meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Seoul I gave a short paper where I turned a critical eye on some of the policies applied by Asian, African, and Latin-American “Tigers.” It was invidious of me to disagree with measures that in the opinion of many have led to fast growth .. MORE
An Economist Looks at Europe
If thou beest he; but O how fallen! How changed From him, who in the happy realm of light Clothed with transcendent brightness didst outshine Myriads though bright. —John Milton: Paradise Lost Few economists in history have attracted such a large following as John Maynard Keynes. Not only did he fascinate two generations in the .. MORE
Book Review, Kling's Corner
When it comes to talent, we will try to teach you how to think past the bureaucracy. We focus on a very specific kind of talent in this book—namely, talent with a creative spark—and that is where the bureaucratic approach is most deadly. In referring to the creative spark, we mean people who generate new .. MORE
Violence and War
Public Choice Theory
Artificial Intelligence
Cost-benefit Analysis
Economic Methods
Cross-country Comparisons
Public Choice Theory
Political Economy
Business Economics
Cross-country Comparisons
econtalk-podcast
Author and conservationist Isabella Tree talks about her book Wilding with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Tree and her husband decided to turn their 3500 acre farm, the Knepp Castle Estate, into something wilder, a place for wild ponies, wild pigs, wild oxen, and an ever-wider variety of birds and bugs. The conversation covers the re-wilding .. MORE
econtalk-extra
Gregory Zuckerman is an author and investigative journalist with the Wall Street Journal. His main area of work is covering business and investing topics. In this episode of EconTalk, Russ Roberts hosts Zuckerman for a conversation on his book: A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 .. MORE
Cost-benefit Analysis
Five Fiscal Truths by Ryan Bourne, Cato at Liberty, April 18, 2024. Excerpt: The recorded federal deficit from 2023, at $1.7 trillion (or 6.3 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP), was 23 percent higher than in 2022, but even that was pushed artificially downward by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recording the Supreme Court’s .. MORE
Economic Methods
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
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Though this book leans on political philosophy, economics, and history, it leans on each lightly enough to remain accessible to the educated general reader, for whom it is mainly intended. Its central theme—how state and society interact to disappoint and render each other miserable—may concern a rather wide public among both governors and governed. Most .. MORE
If the land was divided among all the inhabitants of a country, so that each of them possessed precisely the quantity necessary for his support, and nothing more; it is evident that all of them being equal, no one would work for another. Neither would any of them possess wherewith to pay another for his .. MORE
Bureaucracy has a reputation of being a ‘necessary evil’ in modern western society. We are quick to blame bureaucracy for long waits at the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles], lengthy approval processes for building permits, and for the piles of paperwork at work. Bureaucracy is the source of mandatory workplace trainings and the reason for .. MORE
Book Review of The Politics of Bad Options: Why the Eurozone’s Problems Have Been Hard to Resolve, by Stefanie Walter, Ari Ray, and Nils Redeker.1 The Euro and the Economic and Monetary Union were introduced to promote trade, deeper economic integration, and higher prosperity within the European Union. Largely this all came true. The Euro .. MORE
VIDEO
A professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and a primary figure in Chicago School Economics and in the field of Law and Economics, Harold Demsetz has contributed original research on the theory of the firm, regulation in markets, industrial organization, antitrust policy, transaction costs, externalities, and .. MORE
VIDEO
Recognized as one of the most influential voices in the areas of market structure, the theory of the firm, law and economics, resource unemployment, and monetary theory and policy, in this 2001 interview, Armen Alchian (1914-2013) outlines the “UCLA tradition” of economics which he founded and explores the many unanticipated consequences of self-seeking individual behavior. .. MORE
Econlib Videos
Conversations with some of the most original thinkers of our time
The Reading Lists by Topic pages contain some suggested readings organized by topic, including materials available on Econlib. Brief reviews or descriptions are included for many items.
Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.
These free resources are appropriate for teachers of high school and AP economics, social studies, and history classes. They are also appropriate for interested students, home schoolers, and newcomers to the topic of economics.
[Editor’s note: this article was written in 1992.] To the outside world, the Soviet Union seemed little different in 1984 from what it had been for at least a decade. Except for a few skeptics, almost everyone agreed that the Soviet Union was the world’s second-largest economy and, if not the most powerful military force .. MORE
The fact of scarcity, which exists everywhere, guarantees that people will compete for resources. Markets are one way to organize and channel this competition. Politics is another. People use both markets and politics to get resources allocated to the ends they favor. Even in a democracy, however, political activity is startlingly different from voluntary exchange .. MORE
The Original Federal Reserve System Several monetary institutions appeared in the United States prior to the formation of the Federal Reserve System, or Fed. These were, in order: the constitutional gold (and bimetallic) standard, the First and Second Banks of the United States, the Independent Treasury, the National Banking System, clearinghouse associations, and the National .. MORE
-Arthur Seldon
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-Adam Smith Full Quote >>