Taxation Without Representation: An Enduring American Grievance?

This month, amid World Cup fever, New York City implemented a new job-protection law. This law forbids app-based rideshare platforms from removing drivers unless they can show they have “just cause” or a “bona fide economic reason.” The new law follows a pattern set by a similar pandemic-era law, also from New York City, which… MORE

What happens when a poet who survived prison sits down with the world’s oldest war story–and reads it in three sleepless, wandering days? In this second episode of the EconTalk Book Club on the Iliad, Dwayne Betts and EconTalk host Russ Roberts trade their impressions of the Iliad, discovering it’s less about war than about… MORE

Imagine that history made one small exception. For one evening only, time stopped separating generations. High above the noise of a packed World Cup final game, in a quiet corner of the grandstand untouched by television cameras, eight elderly gentlemen quietly took their seats. No one around them seemed to notice. The crowd had come… MORE

Many people believe that only government intervention prevents rampant discrimination in the private sector. Economic theory predicts the opposite: market mechanisms impose inescapable penalties on profits whenever for-profit enterprises discriminate against individuals on any basis other than productivity. Though bigoted managers may hold sway for a time, in the long run the profit penalty makes… MORE

When economists speak of the “gender gap” these days, they usually are referring to systematic differences in the outcomes that men and women achieve in the labor market. These differences are seen in the percentages of men and women in the labor force, the types of occupations they choose, and their relative incomes or hourly… MORE

  Robert Fogel was corecipient (with Douglass C. North) of the 1993 Nobel Prize in economics “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change.” Fogel earned his master’s degree in economics at Columbia University in 1960, learning economics from george stigler… MORE

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 Monetary History… 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

Anthony de Jasay, a regular columnist for Econlib, was one of the most original and independent thinkers on the relationship between the individual and the state. Through his published works, he challenged the reigning paradigms justifying modern democratic growth. His deeply challenging theoretical works include The State, an analysis that views the state as acting… MORE

Introduction Claudia D. Goldin is an American economic historian and labor economist who has dug deep into often-obscure data sources. She won the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes.” One issue she has focused on is the gender gap, both in employment and in earnings. Indeed,… MORE

Between 1760 and 1860, technological progress, education, and an increasing capital stock transformed England into the workshop of the world. The industrial revolution, as the transformation came to be known, caused a sustained rise in real income per person in England and, as its effects spread, in the rest of the Western world. Historians agree… MORE

Economic historian Joel Mokyr’s work explains how ideas and culture generate compounding technological progress that can accumulate and sustain economic growth. For this work, he, along with Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for “having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress.” Joel Mokyr. Photo courtesy… MORE