The Death of Reading (with James Marriott)

Daron Acemoglu has been the target of an unusually harsh piece in The Economist, which prompted fellow economists to come to his aid. The magazine cast doubt on the data and methods underlying his research on institutions; it suggested that Acemoglu frames complex historical episodes through overly simple narratives, and that “institutions” in his hands… MORE

Incentives matter, sure. But what should you do when following the incentives means quietly participating in something wrong? Psychologist Adam Mastroianni argues that obeying bad incentives–shading a headline for clicks, keeping the found wallet because no one’s watching–is “loser behavior,” a surrender of the hardest and most human task: figuring out right from wrong for… MORE

Daron Acemoglu won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024 and is the third most cited economist of all time. Thus, the paradox of his new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, is that its most serious analytic failures are economic. He provides a sincere and serious consideration of modern liberalism’s estrangement from the working… MORE

Physician and careful reader Richard Gunderman of Indiana University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how Adam Smith and Leo Tolstoy looked at greed. Drawing on Tolstoy’s short story, “Master and Man,” and adding some Thomas Hobbes along the way, Gunderman argues that a life well-lived requires us to rise above our lower desires.… MORE

Author and professor Janine Barchas of the University of Texas talks about her book, The Lost Books of Jane Austen, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. The conversation explores Austen’s enduring reputation, how the cheap reprints of her work allowed that reputation to thrive, the links between Shakespeare and Austen, how Austen has thrived despite the… MORE

As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict,… MORE

Anthony de Jasay, a regular columnist for Econlib, was one of the most original and independent thinkers on the relationship between the individual and the state. Through his published works, he challenged the reigning paradigms justifying modern democratic growth. His deeply challenging theoretical works include The State, an analysis that views the state as acting… MORE

Recognized as one of the most influential voices in the areas of market structure, the theory of the firm, law and economics, resource unemployment, and monetary theory and policy, in this 2001 interview, Armen Alchian (1914-2013) outlines the “UCLA tradition” of economics which he founded and explores the many unanticipated consequences of self-seeking individual behavior.… MORE

Gary Becker (1930-2014) was one of the most original and pathbreaking economists of modern times. His 1992 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences was described as his “having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behavior.” Becker’s early work on discrimination led to his further work… MORE

George Stigler was the quintessential empirical economist. Paging through his classic microeconomics text The Theory of Price, one is struck by how many principles of economics are illustrated with real data rather than hypothetical examples. Stigler deserves a great deal of the credit for getting economists to look at data and evidence. Stigler’s two longest-held… MORE

  Walter Heller’s claim to fame stems from his years as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 1961 to 1964, under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Before that, and after, he was an economics professor at the University of Minnesota. As chairman of the CEA, Heller persuaded President Kennedy… MORE

  From the 1950s through the 1970s, John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the most widely read economists in the United States. One reason is that he wrote so well, with the ability to turn a clever phrase that made those he argued against look foolish. Galbraith’s first major book, published in 1952, is American… MORE