Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about cruelty--what motivates cruelty, the cruelty of small acts that accumulate into something monstrous, and the question of whether the abuse of a robot is a form of cruelty.

By Pierre Lemieux

A story in the outgoing issue of The Economist, “Gary Johnson for Liberty” (September 3, 2018), describes a political meeting of Gary Johnson, the Libertarian presidential candidate in 2016, who is now running for the U.S. Senate in New Mexico. After the meeting, the reporter suggested to Mr. Johnson that he seems ...

By Michael Munger

"The claims for recycling rest on an assumed, if not always articulated, moral imperative rather than on trade-offs or costs. But underlying this claim, for many people at least, is some murky idea that recycling 'uses up' fewer resources than making things from scratch." Two empty bottles, still cool from their mal...

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 encour...

By Kevin Hassett

Investment is one of the most important variables in economics. On its back, humans have ridden from caves to skyscrapers. Its surges and collapses are still a primary cause of recessions. Indeed, as can be seen in Figure 1, investment has dropped sharply during almost every postwar U.S. recession. As the graph suggest...

By Bryan Caplan

My colleague and dear friend Robin Hanson has once again made the world of social media very angry.  His response is to urge people to focus on his actual statements, not speculate about his "true motives." Let us instead revert back to the traditional intellectual standard: respond most to what people say, and don�...

1918-2003

Franco Modigliani, an American born in Italy, received the 1985 Nobel Prize on the basis of two contributions. The first is “his analysis of the behavior of household savers.” In the early 1950s Modigliani, trying to improve on Keynes’s consumption function, which related consumption spending to income, introduce...

By Charles Mackay

Charles Mackay, Scottish poet, journalist, and editor was best known in his day for his verses, some of which were set to music. His book, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, was first published in 1841 (London: Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty), with a promise of ad...

James Tooley, Professor of Education at Newcastle University, talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about low-cost for-profit private schools in the slums and rural areas of poor countries. Tooley shows how surprisingly widespread private schools are for the poor and how effective they are relative to public schools wher...

By Pierre Lemieux

Statements such as "public policy X is (or is not) in the national interest" are omnipresent. For example, Peter Navarro and Greg Autry claim that "some American CEOs" are acting against "our national interest."1 In reality, the concept of national interest is, at best, meaningless. At worst, the concept of nation...