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Book Review, Kling's Corner
“But for some reason, the Dutch started to reject that traditional view of society in the sixteenth century. They entertained the idea that it was perfectly fine to trade and make profits. That new, liberal way of looking at life resulted in a rising standard of living in the Netherlands. It freed up human energy .. MORE
Book Review
A Book Review of Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall.1 It’s been over 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. Ever since those horrible attacks, the United States government has been waging a “war on terror” both at home and abroad. The war on .. MORE
Book Review, Kling's Corner
When it comes to talent, we will try to teach you how to think past the bureaucracy. We focus on a very specific kind of talent in this book—namely, talent with a creative spark—and that is where the bureaucratic approach is most deadly. In referring to the creative spark, we mean people who generate new .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
Game Theory
Free Markets
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
International Trade
Agriculture, Animals, and Food
Fiscal Policy
Energy, Environment, Resources
Economic and Political Philosophy
Biography, Intellectual History
econtalk-extra
Megan McArdle once again joins EconTalk host Russ Roberts to discuss the dangers of the left-leaning bias of Google’s AI to speech and democracy, if such a thing as unbiased information can exist, and how answers without regard for social compliance create nuance and facilitate healthy debate and interaction. McArdle is a columnist for The .. MORE
econtalk-podcast
Law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman talk about their book, Mine! with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Heller and Salzman argue that ownership is trickier and more complicated than it looks. While we tend to think of something as either mine or not mine, there’s often ambiguity and a continuum about who owns what. Salzman .. MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
A Revolution Against Regulation by John Berlau, Law & Liberty, March 20, 2025. Excerpts: The phrase “regulation without representation” also connotes the battle that George Washington and other American patriots fought against taxation without representation. But in researching my book George Washington, Entrepreneur, I found that “regulation without representation” is more than just linguistically connected to the .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
The new issue of Regulation (Vol. 48, No. 1 [Spring 2025]) features, under the rubric “From the Past,” my review of Anthony de Jasay’s book Justice and Its Surroundings (Liberty Fund, 2002). This book may appeal more to political philosophers than to economists, compared with Against Politics (Routledge, 1997) which I recently reviewed for Econlib. .. MORE
Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.
William Brough was born in 1826 in Kelso, Scotland. In his early childhood, the family moved first to Canada and then to Vermont. He began to study medicine but gave it up for business. He moved to New York in 1849 and then to Pennsylvania, where he was a pioneer in the development of the .. MORE
THE contents of the following pages can hardly meet with ready acceptance among those who regard the Science of Political Economy as having already acquired a nearly perfect form. I believe it is generally supposed that Adam Smith laid the foundations of this science; that Malthus, Anderson, and Senior added important doctrines; that Ricardo systematised .. MORE
A Book Review of Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England, by Strother E. Roberts. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2019.1 What do beavers in Connecticut have to do with sugar in Barbados? A lot, it seems. So much, actually, that, if I may push the argument that Strother Roberts makes in Colonial .. MORE
Review of Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink their Way Through the Unfree World,1 by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell. Today’s Socialism We have heard a lot about Socialism lately. It has made a big splash in the United States over the past few years. A string of opinion polls since 2016 have shown an upswell .. MORE
VIDEO
A five-part short video series on the life and contemporary relevance of Adam Smith. This video series, produced by AdamSmithWorks, can be watch as a full 38-minute feature, or in five thematic, classroom-friendly chunks. To access all, click here. Below are some discussion prompts related to this video: Part 1: The Invisible Hand .. MORE
VIDEO
Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Universally respected as one of the founders of the economics of public choice, he is the author of numerous books and hundreds of articles in the areas of public finance, public choice, constitutional economics, and economic .. MORE
Econlib Videos
Conversations with some of the most original thinkers of our time
The Reading Lists by Topic pages contain some suggested readings organized by topic, including materials available on Econlib. Brief reviews or descriptions are included for many items.
Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.
These free resources are appropriate for teachers of high school and AP economics, social studies, and history classes. They are also appropriate for interested students, home schoolers, and newcomers to the topic of economics.
If, as Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, taxes are the price we pay for civilized society, then the progressivity of taxes largely determines how that price varies among individuals. A progressive tax structure is one in which an individual or family’s tax liability as a fraction of income rises with income. If, for example, taxes .. MORE
[Editor’s note: this article was written in 1991.] By the end of 1990 the world’s poor and developing countries owed more than $1.3 trillion to industrialized countries. Among the largest problem debtors were Brazil ($116 billion), Mexico ($97 billion), and Argentina ($61 billion). Of the total developing-country debt, roughly half is owed to private creditors, .. MORE
[An update of Occupational Licensing, by David S. Young.] Occupational licensing today directly affects more than one in five workers in the United States—up from one in 20 workers in the 1950s. This is nearly twice the fraction of workers belonging to a union and more than 15 times the fraction of workers receiving the .. MORE
-Arthur Seldon
-John A. Hobson Full Quote >>
-Leonard E. Read Full Quote >>