Economist Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago talks about poverty with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. In recent years, a number of scholars have claimed that millions of Americans live in extreme poverty, akin to the standard of living in the poorest countries around the world. Meyer argues that these studies are b...

By David R. Henderson

A Book Review of The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn, by Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg.1 Since 1996, I've had a deal with the editors of the Wall Street Journal. I get up early on the West Coast the day the Nobel Prize in Economic Science is announced, decide wi...

By Alberto Mingardi

Today Peru is going to the ballot, for the second round of its Presidential elections. For Agorà, a new YouTube channel of Liberi Oltre, a very active network of Italian scholars and activists, I had a conversation on Peru with Enrique Ghersi, a well-known libertarian scholar and lawyer. The first bit of the video is ...

By Scott Sumner

Over the past year, the US has been hit by a pretty severe labor supply shock. Employment is sharply depressed, but wages are rising fast and companies are having trouble finding workers. At this point the question is not whether a labor supply shock exists, rather the issue is what is causing labor supply to be so dep...

By Pierre Lemieux

The Chinese government relaxed to three children per family its former limit of one child after 1979 and two after 2015 (Lyian Oi, “China Delivers Three-Child Policy, but It’s Too Late for Many,” Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2021). Standard economic analysis provides an easy justification for limiting children: a...

By Steven E. Rhoads

Adam Smith struggled with what came to be called the paradox of “value in use” versus “value in exchange.” Water is necessary to existence and of enormous value in use; diamonds are frivolous and clearly not essential. But the price of diamonds—their value in exchange—is far higher than that of wat...

By Trey Malone and Jayson L. Lusk

Now more than one year since the onset of COVID-19, empty grocery store shelves and panicked shoppers have become the sine qua non of the pandemic's disruptions. Eggs, a common staple food, experienced some of the most dramatic price increases. From February to April 2020, the price of a dozen Grade A eggs at the groce...

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...