By Donald J. Boudreaux

Harvard Economics wunderkind Raj Chetty hopes to change the way students are introduced to economics. Chetty wants there to be more analysis of data and less attention to economic theory. As described by Dylan Matthews writing for Vox, "If Chetty is an advocate for anything, it's for the notion that economics is an emp...

By David Henderson

How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg. --Abraham Lincoln There is no determining who is definitively right in the debate. Income is complicated. Taxes are complicated. Accounting is complicated. But Saez and Zucman have shown how focusing onl...

By Arnold Kling

It was, according to accounts filtering out of the White House, an extraordinary scene. Hank Paulson, the U.S. treasury secretary and a man with a personal fortune estimated at $700m (£380m), had got down on one knee before the most powerful woman in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, and begged her to save his plan to rescue Wa...

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 Amy Willis

What have you binged on lately? The new Dracula? The Crown? You probably automatically thought of your TV when I said "binge," but did you know that the novels of Jane Austen were part of the original "binge"- reading, that is. Will novels such as Austen's ever return to such popular heights?   In this week'...

By Arnold Kling

[T]he large skilled work forces of the advanced sectors of the economy, and the aspirational voters who seek to join these workforces, have interests aligned with the promotion and success of advanced capitalist sectors, and are generally decisive voters. —Torben Iversen and David Soskice, Democracy and Prosperity...

By Sarah Skwire

As a knitter, I was fascinated by the discussion of recycled sweaters and recycled yarn in last week’s Econtalk. Russ Roberts and Adam Minter have a brief exchange about how to recycle wool sweaters. Russ posits that, “It's easy. You just take an end and just start pulling until you get a really long piece of yarn,...

By Arnold C. Harberger

Until the so-called Keynesian revolution of the late 1930s and 1940s, the two main parts of economic theory were typically labeled “monetary theory” and “price theory.” Today, the corresponding dichotomy is between “macroeconomics” and “microeconomics.” The motivating force for the change came from the ...

By Pedro Schwartz

Two years ago, Dennis Rasmussen published a book that he says "was an absolute joy to write" and indeed is a joy to read: The Infidel and the Professor. It is the biography of a "Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought", as the subtitle explains. This deceptively anecdotal story of how David Hume and Adam Smith became th...