incentives, marginal value, superhero benefits
Article
The year was 1965. I was a college sophomore. My family was middle class—not wealthy, watching the budget—and yet, health care was not a problem. In fact, I never heard my parents discuss it. We had our family physician, and if we needed a specialist, we saw one. Holden Hospital was clean, efficient, and—if needed—willing .. MORE
Book Review
Review of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, by Zachary D. Carter.1 Why should someone write another biography of Keynes? Major biographies of John Maynard Keynes (not merely books on Keynes and Keynesianism, of which the supply is far larger) include the 1951 Life of John Maynard Keynes .. MORE
Book Review, Kling's Corner
Can the four-year degree be saved? Not for most learners, I would argue. Once less expensive alternative pathways become clearer and surer, a full-on degree will seem impractical… But why does the degree have to be the only product that colleges sell? And why can’t the American Dream be achieved by other college products, other .. MORE
Economic Theory
Incentives
Philosophy and Methodology
Economic Education
Economic Institutions
Economic Theory
Price Controls
Industry Interviews: Individuals at Work
Economic History
econtalk-podcast
How can we explain the world’s underlying order? How does consciousness emerge? And why do people from such different cultures have such similar near-death experiences? Listen as Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and author of the new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, argues that these and other unanswerable questions underscore his argument for the rationality .. MORE
econtalk-podcast
After filmmaker Penny Lane decided to donate a kidney to a stranger, it took three years and a complex, often infuriating, sometimes terrifying process to make it happen. Along the way, being a filmmaker, she eventually decided to chronicle her experience and explore the question: How can a choice that seems so obvious to the .. MORE
Economic Theory
“Expert failure” is clearly having a moment. Pollsters, Wall Street analysts, tech futurists… all are facing demands to reckon with getting it wrong. Economics, though, seems to be getting special attention. Lately, this has metastasized into Orweillian skepticism of government data itself. It’s one thing to argue that economists have misread numbers. It’s quite another .. MORE
Price Controls
Discussions on what constitutes a “fair” (or just) price are quite old. Classical market liberals will typically classify a fair price as any price that is voluntarily agreed upon by the parties in an exchange. That’s all well and good, but I wonder how useful the concept of “fair price” is. First, a bit of .. MORE
Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.
The theory of spontaneous order has a long tradition in the history of social thought, yet it would be true to say that, until the last decade, it was all but eclipsed in the social science of the twentieth century. For much of this period the idea of spontaneous order—that most of those things of .. MORE
IN this book I have endeavored to determine whether protection or free trade better accords with the interests of labor, and to bring to a common conclusion on this subject those who really desire to raise wages.I have not only gone over the ground generally traversed, and examined the arguments commonly used, but, carrying the .. MORE
A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy, by Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan.1 Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan’s The Reason of Rules is remarkable. It is an important book, and the questions that the authors wrestle with are massive. When so much academic work feels as though it .. MORE
A Book Review of Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall.1 It’s been over 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. Ever since those horrible attacks, the United States government has been waging a “war on terror” both at home and abroad. The war on .. MORE
VIDEO
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
VIDEO
Recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) has long been recognized as one of our most important economic thinkers and a leader of the Chicago school of economics. He is the author of many books and articles in economics, including A Theory of the Consumption Function and A Monetary History .. MORE
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Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.
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CEOs of multinational corporations, exotic dancers, and children with lemonade stands have at least one thing in common. They all expect a return for their effort. Most workers get that return in a subtle and ever-changing combination of money wages and working conditions. This article describes how they changed for the typical U.S. worker during .. MORE
Interest is the price people pay to have resources now rather than later. Resources, of course, can be anything from college tuition to a big-screen TV. Interest is conventionally expressed as a percentage rate for a period of one year. If borrowers (those who want resources now) can obtain the resources from lenders (those who .. MORE
The world’s population increased by 50 percent between 1900 and 1950 and by 140 percent between 1950 and 2000, and is projected by the United Nations to increase by just under 50 percent between 2000 and 2050. Of the 3.44 billion increase in the number of people between 1950 and 2000, only 8 percent was .. MORE
-F. A. Hayek
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