The Great Fertility Collapse (with Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde)

An ordinary person can earn a paycheque, pay her taxes, cover living costs and mortgage payments, and perhaps even add to her savings — and at the end of the day she will still owe most of her mortgage. This is a normal state of affairs, and nobody finds it puzzling. Yet when a company… MORE

Why do we keep doing things we know we shouldn’t? And is that really a failure of will? Author Meghan O’Gieblyn spent years trying to answer that question, first in response to her struggle with alcoholism and her loss of faith, and then by means of Simone Weil, William James, and Iris Murdoch, who argue… MORE

Reading Dean Ball’s recent essay “On the Loose” has me thinking about an old idea in a new light. Ball asks us to imagine a world containing “self-sovereign” AI agents. These are not simply chatbots we rent by the month. They are agents capable of operating independently, acquiring the computer they need to keep running,… MORE

Along with the direct impacts of technology, individualism and a slower life trajectory are the key trends that define the generations of the 20th and 21st centuries. ——Jean M. Twenge, Generations,1 p. 8 Jean Twenge has assembled a wealth of information about how the attitudes, behaviors, health, and economic circumstances of Americans have changed over… MORE

A Book Review of Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England, by Strother E. Roberts. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2019.1 What do beavers in Connecticut have to do with sugar in Barbados? A lot, it seems. So much, actually, that, if I may push the argument that Strother Roberts makes in Colonial… 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

Gary S. Becker received the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics for “having extended the domain of economic theory to aspects of human behavior which had previously been dealt with—if at all—by other social science disciplines such as sociology, demography and criminology.” Becker’s unusually wide applications of economics started early. In 1955 he wrote his doctoral… MORE

Introduction Julian Simon Source: Julian Simon’s personal website Three inter-related arguments made Julian Simon famous: that natural resources are practically infinite; that food supplies have been increasing at least as fast as the population has; and that people, with their skills, spirits, and imaginations, are the ultimate scarce resource. Simon argued that natural resources are… MORE

  Irving Fisher was one of America’s greatest mathematical economists and one of the clearest economics writers of all time. He had the intellect to use mathematics in virtually all his theories and the good sense to introduce it only after he had clearly explained the central principles in words. And he explained very well.… MORE