No Due Date is Econlib's subscription economics book club. Curated by Pete Boettke, you’ll spend a whole year reading with him exploring the best in economics and the social sciences- both classic and contemporary. Subscribers- in addition to receiving a new book each month- also get exclusive access to virtua...

By Virginia Postrel

Libertarian intellectuals and activists know that culture matters. If I had a hundred bucks for every time I'd heard someone chalk up poverty to a black box called "culture" or demand that we "change the culture" or complain that Hollywood or the universities or the media or women in general are culturally biased again...

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Is it better to have more or less population in your country and the world? I ask the question in a short article in the Spring issue of Regulation. I review a few economic and philosophical arguments on both sides of the debate. On the one hand, we have known a certain type of currently recycled environmental argum...

1847-1938

John Bates Clark was one of the leading American economists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He made contributions in the areas of utility theory, marginal productivity theory, capital theory, and competition and antitrust. In his later years, he focused on how to end war. Much of Clark’s early work ...

The listening guides listed here are supplements to accompany podcasts on EconTalk. Each guide consists of seven to ten discussion questions encouraging the listener to think broadly about what the podcast is about and to focus more closely on the key economic ideas discussed by the participants. The guides are app...

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In 1980, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government passed its famous Housing Act. This gave five million council house tenants in England and Wales the ‘Right to Buy’ their house from their local authority at a discount reflecting rent previously paid. For Thatcher, it was the perfect mix of ideological and ...

By Jean-Baptiste Say

A NEW edition of this translation of the popular treatise of M. Say having been called for, the five previous American editions being entirely out of print, the editor has endeavoured to render the work more deserving of the favour it has received, by subjecting every part of it to a careful revision. As the translatio...

1921-2004

  Gerard Debreu’s contributions are in general equilibrium theory—highly abstract theory about whether and how each market reaches equilibrium. In a famous paper coauthored with Kenneth Arrow and published in 1954, Debreu proved that under fairly unrestrictive assumptions, prices exist that bring ...

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Economics emphasizes the power of incentives in influencing how people behave. When I began to read economics, I found this focus on incentives very plausible, because I had seen firsthand a very strong example of how the incentives created by a system of rules was clearly influencing the way people made a major life d...