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Medicare: We Were Warned

By  Walter Donway

The year was 1965. I was a college sophomore. My family was middle class—not wealthy, watching the budget—and yet, health care was not a problem. In fact, I never heard my parents discuss it. We had our family physician, and if we needed a specialist, we saw one. Holden Hospital was clean, efficient, and—if needed—willing .. MORE

Book Review

Of Kings, Keynes, and Capitalism

By  Alberto Mingardi

Review of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, by Zachary D. Carter.1 Why should someone write another biography of Keynes? Major biographies of John Maynard Keynes (not merely books on Keynes and Keynesianism, of which the supply is far larger) include the 1951 Life of John Maynard Keynes .. MORE

Book Review, Kling's Corner

Life After College

By  Arnold Kling

Can the four-year degree be saved? Not for most learners, I would argue. Once less expensive alternative pathways become clearer and surer, a full-on degree will seem impractical… But why does the degree have to be the only product that colleges sell? And why can’t the American Dream be achieved by other college products, other .. MORE

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Economic Theory

Trust Government Statistics, Not Government

By David Hebert

Incentives

It Should Pay to be Super

By Sam Branthoover

Economic Education

EconLog Price Theory: Pricing Plumbing

By Bryan Cutsinger

Economic Institutions

Don’t Mistake a Miracle for Its Cause

By Max Molden

Economic Theory

Profits are Social Authentication

By Art Carden

Price Controls

On Fair Prices

By Jon Murphy

Industry Interviews: Individuals at Work

Twenty Years of Freakonomics (with Stephen Dubner)

Economic History

Straight Whiskey and Dirty Politics

By Daniel Smith

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

Rational and Religious (with Ross Douthat)

How can we explain the world’s underlying order? How does consciousness emerge? And why do people from such different cultures have such similar near-death experiences? Listen as Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and author of the new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, argues that these and other unanswerable questions underscore his argument for the rationality .. MORE

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

EconLog

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Economic Theory

Trust Government Statistics, Not Government

“Expert failure” is clearly having a moment. Pollsters, Wall Street analysts, tech futurists… all are facing demands to reckon with getting it wrong. Economics, though, seems to be getting special attention. Lately, this has metastasized into Orweillian skepticism of government data itself. It’s one thing to argue that economists have misread numbers. It’s quite another .. MORE

Price Controls

On Fair Prices

Discussions on what constitutes a “fair” (or just) price are quite old.  Classical market liberals will typically classify a fair price as any price that is voluntarily agreed upon by the parties in an exchange.  That’s all well and good, but I wonder how useful the concept of “fair price” is. First, a bit of .. MORE

LIBERTY CLASSICS SERIES

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“The Tradition of Spontaneous Order”

By Norman Barry

The theory of spontaneous order has a long tradition in the history of social thought, yet it would be true to say that, until the last decade, it was all but eclipsed in the social science of the twentieth century. For much of this period the idea of spontaneous order—that most of those things of .. MORE

Protection or Free Trade

By Henry George

IN this book I have endeavored to determine whether protection or free trade better accords with the interests of labor, and to bring to a common conclusion on this subject those who really desire to raise wages.I have not only gone over the ground generally traversed, and examined the arguments commonly used, but, carrying the .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

Rules for Non-Radicals

By M. Scott King

A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy, by Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan.1 Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan’s The Reason of Rules is remarkable. It is an important book, and the questions that the authors wrestle with are massive. When so much academic work feels as though it .. MORE

The War That Never Ends

By Nathan Goodman

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

Conversations

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A Conversation with Gary S. Becker

Gary Becker (1930-2014) was one of the most original and pathbreaking economists of modern times. His 1992 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences was described as his “having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behavior.” Becker’s early work on discrimination led to his further work .. MORE

VIDEO

A Conversation with Milton Friedman

Recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) has long been recognized as one of our most important economic thinkers and a leader of the Chicago school of economics. He is the author of many books and articles in economics, including A Theory of the Consumption Function and A Monetary History .. MORE

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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

Labor

Wages and Working Conditions

CEOs of multinational corporations, exotic dancers, and children with lemonade stands have at least one thing in common. They all expect a return for their effort. Most workers get that return in a subtle and ever-changing combination of money wages and working conditions. This article describes how they changed for the typical U.S. worker during .. MORE

Basic Concepts, Money and Banking

Interest

Interest is the price people pay to have resources now rather than later. Resources, of course, can be anything from college tuition to a big-screen TV. Interest is conventionally expressed as a percentage rate for a period of one year. If borrowers (those who want resources now) can obtain the resources from lenders (those who .. MORE

Basic Concepts, Government Policy, Labor

Population

The world’s population increased by 50 percent between 1900 and 1950 and by 140 percent between 1950 and 2000, and is projected by the United Nations to increase by just under 50 percent between 2000 and 2050. Of the 3.44 billion increase in the number of people between 1950 and 2000, only 8 percent was .. MORE

Quotes

We have never designed our economic system. We were not intelligent enough for that. We have tumbled into it and it has carried us to unforeseen heights and given rise to ambitions which may yet lead us to destroy it.

-F. A. Hayek

All human action is speculative; my emphasis on the element of alertness in action has been intended to point out that, far from being numbed by the inescapable uncertainty of our world, men act upon their judgments of what opportunities have been left unexploited by others.

-Israel Kirzner Full Quote >>

Man wants liberty to become the man he wants to become.

-James Buchanan Full Quote >>