Economist and author David Henderson talks about his book (co-authored with Steve Globerman) The Essential UCLA School of Economics with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Much of the conversation focuses on the work of Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, who both saw economics as a powerful tool for understanding human behavi...

By Amy Willis

Can corporate America, and Big Tech in particular, be democratized? How can we make capitalism more accountable to the people? In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes back the OCTOPEST of Microsoft, Glen Weyl. Says Roberts, "I love capitalism. Because capitalism, profit, and loss, gives firms the incentive...

By Pierre Lemieux

The featured image of this post is a photograph I took two weeks ago less than a mile from my home in Maine. It is only illustrative but, I think, powerfully illustrative. In evaluating the truth, objectivity requires one to check one’s own biases. It is not absolutely impossible that in an advanced society with m...

By Kimberly Ann Elliott and Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Barbara Oegg

Throughout most of modern history, economic sanctions have preceded or accompanied war, often in the form of a naval blockade intended to weaken the enemy. Only when the horrors of World War I prompted President Woodrow Wilson to call for an alternative to armed conflict were economic sanctions seriously considered. (W...

By John N. Gray

The traditional interpretation pictures John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) as one of history's paradigmatic transitional thinkers. Situated uncertainly in a no-man's land between the rival intellectual traditions of nineteenth-century England, Mill in his writings displays no settled or coherent doctrine on social and politi...

Introduction Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic. A few of these textbooks include N. Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Economics McConnell, Brue, and Flynn, Economics David ...

By David Henderson

In a comment replying to MikeP about my post "Preach What You Practice," September 20, 2021, I made the point that acting rationally often involves going along with something that doesn't make sense because the penalties are substantial. I wrote: Something that helps me deal with government in these situations is t...

By Arnold Kling

System noise, that is, unwanted variability in judgments that should ideally be identical, can create rampant injustice, high economic costs, and errors of many kinds. —Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein.1 (P. 24) Daniel Kahneman, Cass...

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 ...

By David Henderson

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers tweets: Stunning new estimates suggest that the 400 wealthiest American families paid an average Federal tax rate of only 8.2%. Wow, I thought. That is stunning. It's true that a large percent of Americans have a zero average federal tax rate. But many higher income peo...