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Thinking: Both Fundamental and Misunderstood

In his 2017 Nobel lecture, University of Chicago Professor Richard Thaler focused on how his native discipline, economics, lost its analytical way when economists founded their theories on methodological sand, meaning a premise of not just human rationality, but perfect rationality, in decision making. In his lecture, Thaler stressed the obvious, even to (neoclassical) economists: .. MORE

Book Review

Freedom and the Lawmakers

A Book Review of Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze.1 Liberties, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “depend on the silence of the law.” Nowadays the law is very chatty. Here are three examples from the new book by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze, Over Ruled: .. MORE

Article

Conceived in Liberty or Conceived in Sin? Exploitation and Modern Prosperity

Economics in One Lesson author Henry Hazlitt said that good ideas must be re-learned every generation. As I tell my economic history students, we’re contending for the values of the Enlightenment—life, liberty, equality, and the resulting prosperity. Contrary to what we are often told, we owe our prosperity to liberty, not exploitation, and a flourishing .. MORE

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Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Players, Games, and Rules

By Kevin Corcoran

Free Markets

An Interesting Political Phenomenon

By Pierre Lemieux

Cost-benefit Analysis

Externalities and Public Policy

By Scott Sumner

Central Planning

Martin Anderson on Ronald Reagan’s Smarts

By David Henderson

Adam Smith

The Linguistic Disadvantages of Liberalism

By Marcos Falcone

Economic History

The “Opportunity” to Get Cancer

By David Henderson

Book Review

Feeling Lucky?

By Arnold Kling

Article

Thinking: Both Fundamental and Misunderstood

By Richard B. McKenzie

Book Review

Freedom and the Lawmakers

By Alberto Mingardi

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

Give Away a Kidney? Are You Crazy? (with filmmaker Penny Lane)

After filmmaker Penny Lane decided to donate a kidney to a stranger, it took three years and a complex, often infuriating, sometimes terrifying process to make it happen. Along the way, being a filmmaker, she eventually decided to chronicle her experience and explore the question: How can a choice that seems so obvious to the .. MORE

econtalk-podcast

Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan on Immigration Then and Now

Immigration to the United States, say Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, is more novel than short story: It takes decades for new immigrants to catch up economically. But their kids on average thrive economically and have higher rates of upward mobility than American-born kids. Abramitzky and Boustan talk about their book Streets of Gold with .. MORE

EconLog

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Economic History

The “Opportunity” to Get Cancer

Art Carden has written a terrific article this morning on the huge economic progress we have made in the last 2 centuries. It’s “Conceived in Liberty or Conceived in Sin? Exploitation and Modern Prosperity,” Econlib, November 4, 2024. One excerpt: We are R.I.C.H.: Rich, Interconnected, Civilized, and Healthy. What does this mean? First, I’m referring .. MORE

Cost-benefit Analysis

Externalities and Public Policy

External effects such as air pollution are often cited as an example of a problem that can be usefully addressed by public policy.  In the real world, however, two factors cause externalities to be overemphasized as a justification for regulation: Transactions costs Motivated reasoning A recent article by Geoffrey Kabat in Reason magazine helps to .. MORE

LIBERTY CLASSICS SERIES

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“Readers’ Forum, Comments on ‘The Tradition of Spontaneous Order’ by Norman Barry”

By James M. Buchanan and David Gordon and Israel Kirzner

Norman Barry states, at one point in his essay, that the patterns of spontaneous order “appear to be a product of some omniscient designing mind” (p. 8). Almost everyone who has tried to explain the central principle of elementary economics has, at one time or another, made some similar statement. In making such statements, however, .. MORE

“John Stuart Mill: Traditional and Revisionist Interpretations”

By John N. Gray

The traditional interpretation pictures John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) as one of history’s paradigmatic transitional thinkers. Situated uncertainly in a no-man’s land between the rival intellectual traditions of nineteenth-century England, Mill in his writings displays no settled or coherent doctrine on social and political questions. In Mill’s work, the received view contends, competing sympathies and commitments .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

The State Is Us (Perhaps), But Beware of It!

By Pierre Lemieux

A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.1 First published sixty years ago this year, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock‘s The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy is widely recognized as a seminal work in the development of the .. MORE

Hayek, Mises, and the Methodology of the Social Sciences

By Adam Martin

The Fortunes of Liberalism1 collects a wide-ranging number of Friedrich. A. Hayek’s articles, reviews, addresses, and even obituaries—35 in total—spanning all seven decades of his scholarly career from the 1920s to the 1980s. To call this collection eclectic is an understatement, but the unifying theme is Hayek’s perspective on thinkers who have some connection to .. MORE

Conversations

VIDEO

Capitalism, Government, and the Good Society

On April 10, 2013, Liberty Fund and Butler University sponsored a symposium, “Capitalism, Government, and the Good Society.” The evening began with solo presentations by the three participants–Michael Munger of Duke University, Robert Skidelsky of the University of Warwick, and Richard Epstein of New York University. (Travel complications forced the fourth invited participant, James Galbraith .. MORE

VIDEO

A Conversation with Ronald H. Coase

Nobel laureate Ronald H. Coase (1910-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Coase’s articles, “The Problem of Social Cost” and “The Nature of the Firm” are among the most important and most often cited works in the whole of economic literature. Coase recounts how he tried to encourage .. MORE

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Conversations with some of the most original thinkers of our time

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Guides

College Economics Topics

Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.

Economist Biographies

From the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Macroeconomics

Gross Output

Gross output (GO) is a relatively new macroeconomic statistic that measures total economic activity. Gross domestic product (GDP)—the other major measure of economic activity—accounts only for final goods and services. However, GO’s scope includes both final output as well as intermediate inputs at all earlier stages of production. Therefore, GO is a much more comprehensive measure .. MORE

Taxes, Government Policy

Progressive Taxes

If, as Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, taxes are the price we pay for civilized society, then the progressivity of taxes largely determines how that price varies among individuals. A progressive tax structure is one in which an individual or family’s tax liability as a fraction of income rises with income. If, for example, taxes .. MORE

Economic Regulation, Government Policy, The Marketplace

Privatization

“ Privatization” is an umbrella term covering several distinct types of transactions. Broadly speaking, it means the shift of some or all of the responsibility for a function from government to the private sector. The term has most commonly been applied to the divestiture, by sale or long-term lease, of a state-owned enterprise to private .. MORE

Quotes

The arguments against capitalism are legion. Some are valid. The defenders of capitalism weaken their case by denying them. Defending the indefensible in capitalism is not the way to vindicate its superiority over socialism.  

-Arthur Seldon

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen. Selected Essays on Political Economy

-Frederic Bastiat Full Quote >>

The grail-like search for some “public interest” apart from, and independent of, the separate interests of the individual participants in social choice is a familiar activity to be found among both the theorists and the practitioners of modern democracy.  

-James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock Full Quote >>