By Richard B. McKenzie

At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, only seven states—Arkansas, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, and Wyoming—had resisted statewide stay-at-home or lockdown regulations to contain the virus (a new strain of coronavirus disease). Even though those states have less than 10 percent of the country's popu...

Journalist and author Sarah Carr talks about her book Hope Against Hope with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Carr looked at three schools in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and chronicled their successes, failures, and the challenges facing educational reform in the poorest parts of America.

By Rosolino Candela

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ludwig von Mises’s seminal article, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” which marked the first salvo in what later became the socialist calculation debate. Though the contributions of F.A. Hayek to that debate, and to economic science m...

By Andrew R. Dick

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and just...

By Frank H. Knight

The text has been altered as little as possible from the original edition ( Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, Frank H. Knight, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Economics in the State University of Iowa; Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press, 1921).A few corrections of obvious typos were made for thi...

By Scott Sumner

Bryan Caplan has a post on Covid-19 that is full of sensible ideas. But I disagree with one of his claims: 18. Alex Tabarrok is wrong to state, “Social distancing, closing non-essential firms and working from home protect the vulnerable but these same practices protect workers in critical industries. Thus, the deba...

By Amy Willis

How can it be that the United States continues to experience tremendous economic growth- while using fewer resources in the process? That's the driving question behind this week's episode. Host Russ Roberts welcomes back MIT's Andrew McAfee, this time to talk about the "dematerialization" of the economy. McAfee (along ...

1727-1781

  Turgot was the French Adam Smith. His Reflections on the Production and Distribution of Wealth, which predated Smith’s The Wealth of Nations by ten years, argues against government intervention in the economic sector. Turgot recognized the function of the division of labor, investigated how prices wer...

By Peter Boettke

In my previous two posts, I offered recommendations for reading on the Russian Revolution and the Soviet economy. Today, I'd like to turn our attention everyday life in the Soviet Union. My most cherished comment on one of my books dealing with the Soviet system was from then Department Chair of Economics at Moscow ...

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. ...