Jenny Schuetz of the Brookings Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about zoning, boarding houses, real estate development, and the housing market.

By Deepak Lal

Foreign aid as a form of capital flow is novel in both its magnitude and its global coverage. Though historical examples of countries paying “bribes” (see below) or “reparations” to others are numerous, the continuing large-scale transfer of capital from rich-country governments to those of poor countries is a ...

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 Roger Koppl

Part 3: Should Experts Have Power? In my last two EconLog essays (here and here), I examined some of the causes of expert failure seemingly at work in the present crisis. I pointed out that we don't know how to strike a balance among the different expert silos such as medicine and economics. And I pointed out that in ...

By Eugen v. Böhm-Bawerk

My only reasons for writing a preface to a work so exhaustive, and in itself so lucid, as Professor Böhm-Bawerk's Kapital und Kapitalzins, are that I think it may be advisable to put the problem with which it deals in a way more familiar to English readers, and to show that the various theories stated and criticised ...

By David Henderson

Not the color of their uniform but the content of their character. I've been talking to 4 of my friends far more frequently on the phone over the last 2 weeks. I can't understand why. :-) My conversation with one of those friends tends often to turn into disempowering "Ain't it awful?" The issues range from the h...

By Amy Willis

"I don't know how you get people back to realizing that when I buy a piece of property I have some say in what I can do on my property, but I don't have the right to control what my neighbors do with their property." ~Jenny Schuetz   It's said that moving homes is one of the most stressful life experiences w...

By W. Kip Viscusi

Many people believe that employers do not care about workplace safety. If the government were not regulating job safety, they contend, workplaces would be unsafe. In fact, employers have many incentives to make workplaces safe. Since the time of Adam Smith, economists have observed that workers demand “compensating d...

By Pedro Schwartz

A growing number of people see climate change as an example of the tragedy of the commons: the 'over-grazing' of collectively owned open lands by an unstructured group of people. The logic of individual self-interest will lead each and every individual to try to steal a march on the rest of the group before the rest ov...

1806-1873

  The eldest son of economist James Mill, John Stuart Mill was educated according to the rigorous expectations of his Benthamite father. He was taught Greek at age three and Latin at age eight. By the time he reached young adulthood John Stuart Mill was a formidable intellectual, albeit an emotionally dep...

By Bryan Caplan

When I was seventeen, I read Dale Carnegie's classic self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Even in my youth, I knew it was packed with wisdom, but I was not ready to listen.  Recently, I reread the book - and it totally holds up.  As I read, I realized that I've spent much of the last thirty year...

Journalist and author Adam Minter talks about his book Secondhand with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Minter explores the strange and fascinating world of secondhand stuff--the downsizing that the elderly do when they move to smaller quarters, the unseen side of Goodwill Industries, and the global market for rags.