1899-1992

If any twentieth-century economist was a Renaissance man, it was Friedrich Hayek. He made fundamental contributions in political theory, psychology, and economics. In a field in which the relevance of ideas often is eclipsed by expansions on an initial theory, many of his contributions are so remarkable that people sti...

Journalist and author Rowan Jacobsen talks about his book Truffle Hound with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. This conversation has nothing to do with chocolate. It's about the strange world of underground fungi, found in the forest by specially trained dogs and used by chefs and home cooks around the world. You will learn ...

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There's a lot of recent discussion about how the country has become increasingly polarized. One way of getting at the issue is by looking at the opposite question: Why weren't we polarized in the past? Here it will be useful to consider the mid-1960s and the late-1980s, two periods in which political polarization mi...

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 Russell Roberts

"The government decided to pay the captains a bonus for each convict that walked off the boat in Australia alive." Towards the end of the 18th century, England began sending convicts to Australia. The transportation was privately provided but publicly funded. A lot of convicts died along the way, from disease due to...

By George J. Stigler

A monopoly is an enterprise that is the only seller of a good or service. In the absence of government intervention, a monopoly is free to set any price it chooses and will usually set the price that yields the largest possible profit. Just being a monopoly need not make an enterprise more profitable than other enterpr...

1903-1983

  British economist Joan Robinson was arguably the only woman born before 1930 who can be considered a great economist. She was in the same league as others who received the Nobel Prize; indeed, many economists expected her to win the prize in 1975. Business Week was so sure of it that it published a ...

By Pedro Schwartz

The ballot box produces unanimity without conformity; the marketplace, unanimity without uniformity. —Free to Choose, Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman The search for a method of collective decision-making to solve social problems in a rational manner is the Holy Grail of American libera...