How Your Situation Shapes You (with Angela Duckworth)

Sam Enright works on innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent policy think tank in Dublin, and runs a publication called The Fitzwilliam. Most relevant to us, on his personal blog, he writes a popular link roundup; what follows is an abridged version of his Links for August. Blogs and short links Notes from my… MORE

What if you did everything right and discovered on your deathbed that you’ve wasted your life? Rabbi and author David Wolpe talks about Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts. Weaving Rabbi Wolpe’s own brushes with mortality and his years at the bedsides of the dying into Tolstoy’s masterpiece, they talk about the lies we tell… MORE

Senator Phil Gramm and Professor Donald Boudreaux have been named the inaugural recipients of The Liberty Fund Prize for Advancing Economic Liberty, presented by The Neal and Jane Freeman Foundation. Through decades of teaching, writing, and public discourse, both honorees have deepened the public’s understanding of how competitive markets sustain a free society. The prize… MORE

“To get the most out of life, to think like an economist, you have to be know what you’re giving up in order to get something else.” One of the challenges of being an economist is explaining what you do for a living. People understand that one of the things a professor of economics does… MORE

If you are anything like us, you are busy trying to maximize these last glorious days of summer. And you are probably also desperately trying to find the time to finish the pile of summer reading you planned for yourself at the beginning of summer. We are not here to help. As summer winds to… MORE

The twentieth century witnessed the unparalleled expansion of government power over the lives and livelihoods of individuals. Much of this was the result of two devastating world wars and totalitarian ideologies that directly challenged individual liberty and the free institutions of the open society. Other forms of expansion in the provision of social welfare and… MORE

On April 10, 2013, Liberty Fund and Butler University sponsored a symposium, “Capitalism, Government, and the Good Society.” The evening began with solo presentations by the three participants–Michael Munger of Duke University, Robert Skidelsky of the University of Warwick, and Richard Epstein of New York University. (Travel complications forced the fourth invited participant, James Galbraith… MORE

A five-part short video series on the life and contemporary relevance of Adam Smith. This video series, produced by AdamSmithWorks, can be watch as a full 38-minute feature, or in five thematic, classroom-friendly chunks. To access all, click here.   Below are some discussion prompts related to this video:   Part 1: The Invisible Hand… MORE

Thomas Sargent was awarded, along with Christopher Sims, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The Nobel committee cited their “empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.” The Swedish economists who spoke at the press conference announcing the award emphasized the importance of Sargent’s and Sims’ thinking about the role of people’s expectations.… MORE

  Malthus was interested in everything about populations. He accumulated figures on births, deaths, age of marriage and childbearing, and economic factors contributing to longevity. His main contribution was to highlight the relationship between food supply and population. Humans do not overpopulate to the point of starvation, he contended, only because people change their behavior… MORE

  Franco Modigliani, an American born in Italy, received the 1985 Nobel Prize on the basis of two contributions. The first is “his analysis of the behavior of household savers.” In the early 1950s Modigliani, trying to improve on Keynes’s consumption function, which related consumption spending to income, introduced his “life cycle” model of consumption.… MORE