By Alberto Mingardi

with Terence Kealey This is a continuation of our earlier post here, written in response to this recent EconTalk episode on which Mazzucato was the guest.   Mazzucato’s key idea is that the government’s pockets are virtually inexhaustible: government “can print money”, as she explains to Rober...

By Steven Horwitz

You might think economists are obsessed with the idea of "cost." It is nearly impossible to talk to or read economists without our invoking cost for some reason or another. This is, however, not some irrational obsession on our part. The concept of cost is at the very heart of economics. It comes into play in almost ev...

[Listener Survey of 2018: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TCWSC3J. Vote for your favorites!] This week, historian and author Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the historical significance of the life and work of Aleksandr Solzhe...

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In 1998, Amartya Sen received the Nobel Prize “for his contributions to welfare economics.” Much of Sen’s early work was on issues raised by kenneth arrow’s “impossibility theorem.” Arrow had shown, much more generally than Condorcet had in 1785, that majority rules often lead to intransitivities. A majorit...

By Charles L. Hooper

"Can you imagine anyone celebrating a decline in the value of his or her assets?" Many Americans may not realize that some of today's political leaders and mainstream media espouse ideas that were discredited and left for dead over two hundred years ago. As in any number of horror flicks, sometimes the dead don't st...

By Arnold Kling

It was, according to accounts filtering out of the White House, an extraordinary scene. Hank Paulson, the U.S. treasury secretary and a man with a personal fortune estimated at $700m (£380m), had got down on one knee before the most powerful woman in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, and begged her to save his plan to rescue Wa...

By Scott Sumner

James Hamilton provided one of my all-time favorite quotations: You could argue that if the Fed is doing its job properly, any recession should have been impossible to predict ahead of time. In many cases, the disasters that strike us are unexpected.  The 1973 oil embargo.  The 9/11 attacks.  The Lehman moment. ...

Cathy O'Neil, data scientist and blogger at mathbabe.org, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her journey from Wall Street to Occupy Wall Street. She talks about her experiences on Wall Street that ultimately led her to join the Occupy Wall Street movement. Along the way, the conversation includes a look at the...

By Eugene Richter

Eugene Richter (1838-1906) was a member of a generation of classical liberals who died between the turn of the 19th century and the First World War. This generation included the French economist Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), the English sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the English historian Lord Acton (183...

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 ...