Sam’s Links: September Edition

Sure, you can use willpower or grit to break bad habits and build new ones. But maybe the key to success is simpler: change your situation. Psychologist Angela Duckworth explains to EconTalk’s Russ Roberts why the people and places around us shape our behavior more than we realize–and why we’re hard-wired to resist that idea.… 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

In their textbook, Modern Principles of Economics, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok ask what happens when Walmart buys toys from a Chinese supplier. I decided to test this once by going to my local Walmart and buying an action figure of All Elite Wrestling’s Brody King, which is part of the Jazwares “Unrivaled” collection and… MORE

“Trying to calculate the waste of government by analyzing total expenditures is a poor method. A large fraction of government spending consists of transfers.” Critics of government intervention have pointed out the waste of resources associated with various programs and regulations. Yet, even most fans of the free market would be surprised to see how… 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

A professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and a primary figure in Chicago School Economics and in the field of Law and Economics, Harold Demsetz has contributed original research on the theory of the firm, regulation in markets, industrial organization, antitrust policy, transaction costs, externalities, and… MORE

  Harry Johnson, a Canadian, was one of the most active and prolific economists of all time. His main research was in the area of international trade, international finance, and monetary policy. One of Johnson’s early articles on international trade showed that a country with monopoly power in some good could impose a tariff and… MORE

  The American economist James Tobin received the 1981 Nobel Prize “for his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production, and prices.” Many people regard Tobin as America’s most distinguished Keynesian economist. Tobin’s most important work was on financial markets. He developed theories to explain how financial markets affect people’s… MORE

French economist J. B. Say is most commonly identified with Say’s Law, which states that supply creates its own demand. Over the years Say’s Law has been embroiled in two kinds of controversy—the first over its authorship, the second over what it means and, given each meaning, whether it is true. On the first controversy,… MORE