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Prosperity Without a Price Tag

By  Lauren Heller

Every time a large event comes to a city, there’s a flurry of excitement over the gigantic economic impact that these events are supposed to generate. Examples abound, from the hundreds of millions of dollars of impact predicted for a host city of a political convention or Super Bowl, to the billions of dollars of .. MORE

An Economist Looks at Europe

Thoughts for Tigers

By  Pedro Schwartz

At the 2017 Regional meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Seoul I gave a short paper where I turned a critical eye on some of the policies applied by Asian, African, and Latin-American “Tigers.” It was invidious of me to disagree with measures that in the opinion of many have led to fast growth .. MORE

Article

Monopoly and Barriers to Entry: Old Wine in New Bottles

By  Rosolino Candela

The year 2022 marks the 75th anniversary of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society organized by F. A. Hayek. What is particularly interesting is the fact that—as highlighted in the transcripts of that meeting recently published by Bruce Caldwell as Mont Pèlerin 1947 (2022)—the role of public policy in regulating market power and .. MORE

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Introducing: Sam’s Links

By Sam Enright

Economic Education

Why Liberalism

By Jon Murphy

Book Review

On Solving Social Dilemmas

By Vincent Geloso

Economic Theory

Trust Government Statistics, Not Government

By David Hebert

Incentives

It Should Pay to be Super

By Sam Branthoover

Economic Education

EconLog Price Theory: Pricing Plumbing

By Bryan Cutsinger

Economic Institutions

Don’t Mistake a Miracle for Its Cause

By Max Molden

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econtalk-podcast

Michael Brendan Dougherty on My Father Left Me Ireland

Author and journalist Michael Brendan Dougherty talks about his book My Father Left Me Ireland with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Dougherty talks about the role of cultural and national roots in our lives and the challenges of cultural freedom in America. What makes us feel part of something? Do you feel American or just someone .. MORE

econtalk-podcast

Zach Weinersmith on Beowulf and Bea Wolf

Tolkien read it as a tale about mortality. The poet David Whyte said it was a metaphor for the psychological demons deep in our minds. And that, insists the cartoonist and writer Zach Weinersmith, is precisely Beowulf’s appeal: Its richness opens the door to endless interpretation. Listen as the author of Bea Wolf, a graphic .. MORE

EconLog

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Economic Theory

Trust Government Statistics, Not Government

“Expert failure” is clearly having a moment. Pollsters, Wall Street analysts, tech futurists… all are facing demands to reckon with getting it wrong. Economics, though, seems to be getting special attention. Lately, this has metastasized into Orweillian skepticism of government data itself. It’s one thing to argue that economists have misread numbers. It’s quite another .. MORE

Economic Education

EconLog Price Theory: Pricing Plumbing

This is the latest in our series of posts in our series on price theory problems with Professor Bryan Cutsinger. You can see all of Cutsinger’s problems and solutions by subscribing to his EconLog RSS feed. Share your proposed solutions in the comments. Professor Cutsinger will be present in the comments for the next couple of .. MORE

LIBERTY CLASSICS SERIES

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continued relevance of our classic titles.

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Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory

By James M. Buchanan

You face a choice. You must now decide whether to read this Preface, to read something else, to think silent thoughts, or perhaps to write a bit for yourself. The value that you place on the most attractive of these several alternatives is the cost that you must pay if you choose to read this .. MORE

Arthur Young’s Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788, 1789

By Arthur Young

Arthur Young (1741-1820) was an 18th century English writer who is best known for the detailed accounts he published of his “travels” in England, Wales, Ireland and France on the eve of the revolution. After he inherited his father’s family estate in 1759 he began experimenting with agricultural improvements in order to maximise output. Although .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

Where Is the Free Market Utopia?

By Art Carden

A Book Review of The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, by Thomas Philippon.1 The Great Reversal defends a provocative and surprising thesis: the United States has given up on free markets while Europe has embraced them. As a result, Europeans pay less and get more in a lot of industries, like .. MORE

Love and Economics

By Liya Palagashvili

A Book Review of Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Economics I Learned from Online Dating, by Paul Oyer.1   Match.com, eHarmony, and OkCupid, it turns out, are no different from eBay or Monster.com. On all these sites, people come together trying to find matches. —Paul Oyer, Everything I Ever Needed to Know About .. MORE

Conversations

VIDEO

A Conversation with Steve Pejovich

Svetozar “Steve” Pejovich, one of the most dynamic and insightful theorists writing on property rights, reflects on his experience in economics. With characteristic sagacity and humor, he demonstrates the power that empirical cases can bring to bear on theoretical problems. Born in Belgrade, Pejovich is Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University, where he taught for .. MORE

VIDEO

A Conversation with Harold Demsetz

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

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College Economics Topics

Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.

Economist Biographies

From the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Macroeconomics

Gross Output

Gross output (GO) is a relatively new macroeconomic statistic that measures total economic activity. Gross domestic product (GDP)—the other major measure of economic activity—accounts only for final goods and services. However, GO’s scope includes both final output as well as intermediate inputs at all earlier stages of production. Therefore, GO is a much more comprehensive measure .. MORE

Economic Regulation, Government Policy

Trucking Deregulation

Regulation The federal government has been regulating prices and competition in interstate transportation ever since Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to oversee the railroad industry in 1887. Truckers were brought under the control of the ICC in 1935 after persistent lobbying by state regulators, the ICC itself, and especially, the railroads, which had .. MORE

Economic History, Government Policy, Taxes

Taxation

In recent years, taxation has been one of the most prominent and controversial topics in economic policy. Taxation has been a principal issue in every presidential election since 1980—with a large tax cut as a winning issue in 1980, a pledge of “Read my lips: no new taxes” in the 1988 campaign, and a statement .. MORE

Quotes

One of the great achievements of the market process is that it does not suffer fools gladly, that it rather quickly takes the control of resources from the hands of the incompetent.

-Benjamin A. Rogge and Pierre F. Goodrich

The “market” or market organization is not a means toward the accomplishment of anything. It is, instead, the institutional embodiment of the voluntary exchange processes that are entered into by individuals in their several capacities. This is all there is to it.

-James M. Buchanan

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. Frederic Bastiat, The Law

-Frederic Bastiat Full Quote >>