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Featured Article
Introduction “The wireless approach may pose a regulatory dilemma for Congress and the FCC. The terms of existing spectrum licenses are not flexible enough to accommodate the wireless last mile.” Imagine what the Internet might do for you if high-speed access were available anywhere and everywhere. You could access the Internet in all of the .. MORE
Ten Key Ideas
This essay is part of Ten Key Ideas, an occasional series on fundamental economic concepts. “We call politicians our representatives and they often claim to be fighting for us. But when we think about it, we understand that our interests are diverse and that no politician can really fight for all of us.” Sometimes it’s .. MORE
Featured Article
“Paper junk mail has to have postage…. Not so with email…. From an economic perspective, spam is just another form of pollution, an activity that imposes costs on people without their permission.” WASHINGTON For the amount of outrage, frustration, and sheer volume of complaints it generates, few Internet phenomena compare to the lowly unwanted email .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Violence and War
Public Choice Theory
Artificial Intelligence
Cost-benefit Analysis
Economic Methods
Cross-country Comparisons
Public Choice Theory
Political Economy
Business Economics
econtalk-podcast
Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the value of a college education. Caplan argues that the extra amount that college graduates earn relative to high school graduates is misleading as a guide for attending college–it ignores the fact that a sizable number of students .. MORE
econtalk-podcast
In this 750th (!) episode, Duke University’s Michael Munger talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about whether the pandemic might create an opportunity for colleges and universities to experiment and innovate. Munger is Professor of Political Science, Economics and Public Policy at Duke. He believes “top” schools can emerge from the current period of uncertainty .. 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
Business Economics
Economic and business historian Robert Hessen died on Monday, April 15 at age 87. I wrote some reminiscences of him on my Substack site, “I Blog to Differ.” Here I want to link to his 2 contributions to my Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. One is his article “Corporations.” Here are two key paragraphs. Here’s a .. MORE
Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.
In the recent revival of public and scholarly interest in the values of limited government and the market order, no one has been more centrally significant than Friedrich A. Hayek. His works have figured as a constant point of reference in the discussions both of the libertarian and conservative theories of the market economy; they .. MORE
THE purpose of this book is to set forth the principles determining the purchasing power of money and to apply those principles to the study of historical changes in that purchasing power, including in particular the recent change in “the cost of living,” which has aroused world-wide discussion.If the principles here advocated are correct, the .. 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.
The Phillips curve represents the relationship between the rate of inflation and the unemployment rate. Although he had precursors, A. W. H. Phillips’s study of wage inflation and unemployment in the United Kingdom from 1861 to 1957 is a milestone in the development of macroeconomics. Phillips found a consistent inverse relationship: when unemployment was high, .. MORE
The prisoners’ dilemma is the best-known game of strategy in social science. It helps us understand what governs the balance between cooperation and competition in business, in politics, and in social settings. In the traditional version of the game, the police have arrested two suspects and are interrogating them in separate rooms. Each can either .. MORE
“ Capitalism,” a term of disparagement coined by socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, is a misnomer for “economic individualism,” which Adam Smith earlier called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” (Wealth of Nations). Economic individualism’s basic premise is that the pursuit of self-interest and the right to own private property are morally defensible .. MORE
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-Ludwig von Mises Full Quote >>
-Adam Smith Full Quote >>