By Bryan Caplan

I recently received this email from a self-styled "anti-school teacher."  Reprinted unchanged with permission of the author, Samuel Mosley. Dear Professor Caplan, My name is Samuel Mosley. I studied economics at Beloit College, my advisor was a former graduate student of yours, Laura Grube. I recently rea...

Author, economist, and theologian Mary Hirschfeld of Villanova University talks about her book, Aquinas and the Market, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Hirschfeld looks at the nature of our economic activity as buyers and sellers and whether our pursuit of economic growth and material well-being comes at a cost. She e...

By Pedro Schwartz

If thou beest he; but O how fallen! How changed From him, who in the happy realm of light Clothed with transcendent brightness didst outshine Myriads though bright. —John Milton: Paradise Lost Few economists in history have attracted such a large following as John Maynard Keyn...

By David Prychitko

More than a century after his death, Karl Marx remains one of the most controversial figures in the Western world. His relentless criticism of capitalism and his corresponding promise of an inevitable, harmonious socialist future inspired a revolution of global proportions. It seemed that—with the Bolshevik revolutio...

By Pierre Lemieux

Recent stock market gyrations illustrate one interesting phenomenon. Each time the administration promises an easing in the “trade tensions” it itself created, the stock market picks up. Every time the promises are not realized, the market drops. And the process starts again. Today’s Wall Street Journal writes...

1851-1926

Economist Knut Wicksell made his name among the Swedish public with a series of provocative lectures on the causes of prostitution, drunkenness, poverty, and overpopulation. A malthusian, the young Wicksell advocated birth control as the cure for these social ills. His image as a radical social reformer did much to att...

Historian Christy Ford Chapin of University of Maryland Baltimore County and Johns Hopkins and author of Ensuring America's Health talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her book--a history of how America's health care system came to be dominated by insurance companies or government agencies paying doctors per pro...

By Arnold Kling

I have a complaint about America today, and it is simple: we don't love business enough. —Tyler Cowen, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero,1 page 6 Tyler Cowen's book, Big Business, is subtitled A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero, but it could be described as a complaint letter directed...

By Amy Willis

When someone asks you how you are, what's your standard reply? Are you "fine?" "I'm really busy?" What does your reply say about the way in which you regard your most precious resource, your time? That's the subject of this week's episode, in which EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes labor economist Daniel Hamermesh t...

By Bryan Caplan

Positive externalities are benefits that are infeasible to charge to provide; negative externalities are costs that are infeasible to charge to not provide. Ordinarily, as Adam Smith explained, selfishness leads markets to produce whatever people want; to get rich, you have to sell what the public is eager to buy. Exte...

By David Henderson

I discussed the late Alice Rivlin here and here. Here are one personal reminiscence about Alice Rivlin and one thought about a 1993 or 1994 Wall Street Journal op/ed she wrote. At the December 1988 American Economic Association Meetings, Alice was on a panel with Martin Feldstein and Mike Boskin. The chair was Jo...

By Frédéric Bastiat

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman, and author. He was the leader of the free-trade movement in France from its inception in 1840 until his untimely death in 1850. The first 45 years of his life were spent in preparation for five tremendously productive years writing in favor of freedom. B...

Daron Acemoglu of MIT and author (with James Robinson) of Why Nations Fail talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in his book: why some nations fail and others succeed, why some nations grow over time and sustain that growth, while others grow and then stagnate.  Acemoglu draws on an exceptionally rich ...

By Scott Sumner

Robert Shrimsley has an amusing piece in the Financial Times, which discusses virtue signalling: Virtue-signalling, for those who have never felt drawn to the term, is the apparently modern crime of trying to be seen doing the right thing. The implication is that the virtue-signaller does not really believe what th...