By Amy Willis

Have you been dreaming of driverless cars like EconTalk host Russ Roberts? Well, author Matthew Crawford might turn your dreams into nightmares. Crawford joins Roberts in this episode to discuss his book, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. Crawford is a devotee of serendipity, and finds the open road- ...

1920-2013

Lawrence R. Klein received the Nobel Prize in 1980 for “the creation of economic models and their application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies.” Klein began model building while still a graduate student. After getting his Ph.D. from MIT, he moved on to the Cowles Commission for Researc...

By David Henderson

Tyler Cowen has posted an outstanding interview of Noubar Afeyan, co-founder of Moderna, which produces one of the two COVID-19 vaccines approved so far by the Food and Drug Administration. Tyler is at the top of his game, asking really good questions, and you can just see the respect that that creates in Afeyan. So...

By Arnold Kling

Why is business so good in politics? Why does it work so well for the industry itself but not for everyone else? Only by teasing apart the key rules and practices—the machinery of elections and legislating—that have been set and optimized by the duopoly over generations can we answer these questions and devise solu...

By Michael Munger

Division of labor combines specialization and the partition of a complex production task into several, or many, sub-tasks. Its importance in economics lies in the fact that a given number of workers can produce far more output using division of labor compared to the same number of workers each working alone. Interestin...

By Kenneth A. Small

The defining trait of urban areas is density: of people, activities, and structures. The defining trait of urban transportation is the ability to cope with this density while moving people and goods. Density creates challenges for urban transportation because of crowding and the expense of providing infrastructure in b...

By Irving Fisher

THE tremendous expansion of credit during and since the World War to finance military operations as well as post-war reparations, reconstruction, and the rebuilding of industry and trade has brought the problems of capitalism and the nature and origin of interest home afresh to the minds of business men as well as to e...

By Bryan Caplan

My Open Borders neglects two major worries about immigration. The first is contagious disease; I did not see that one coming, though I try to remedy my oversight here. The second omission is less excusable.  Somehow I failed to address immigration's environmental effects.  Here's what I should have said - and w...

By Arnold Kling

Some of the best economics books of recent years have been written by economists about other economists. Perry Mehrling on Fischer Black.1 Robert Murphy on Ludwig von Mises.2 And now L. Randall Wray on Hyman Minsky.3 Each of the individuals profiled was far from the mainstream and yet offered important insights. Each o...

By Scott Sumner

A year ago, Tyler Cowen claimed that President Trump won round one of the trade war with China: I'm not entirely convinced we won even the first round of the trade war, although the claim might be true.  The stated goal of President Trump and his advisers was to reduce the US trade deficit with China.  A secon...

By Tyler Cowen

Public goods have two distinct aspects: nonexcludability and nonrivalrous consumption. “Nonexcludability” means that the cost of keeping nonpayers from enjoying the benefits of the good or service is prohibitive. If an entrepreneur stages a fireworks show, for example, people can watch the show from their windows o...

***** TAKE THE 2020 ECONTALK SURVEY: https://tinyurl.com/y6tzqvg6. VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE EPISODES OF THE YEAR! ***** Economist and author Don Boudreaux of George Mason University discusses the life and work of the economist James Buchanan with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Buchanan received the Nobel Prize in 1986 ...