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Book Review, Kling's Corner

Mir McLuhanism

… digital media not only enhance information exchange and render offline life obsolete—they also reverse literacy and retrieve orality. … This book is about orality, which once was obsolesced by writing, and about literacy, which is now becoming obsolesced by digital media. —Andrey Mir, Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s .. MORE

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Is China Winning? Rethinking Perceptions of Success in Central Planning

The contrast often presented between America and China is one where Beijing is a highly competent, well-oiled autocracy while the United States is a political circus held back by partisan drama. On the surface, and especially with recent news headlines, this may seem true. One might recall Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell staring blankly into .. MORE

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California Dreaming: The Effects of California’s “Fast Food” Minimum Wage

On April 1 of this year, California fast-food restaurant chains with sixty or more national locations (for example, McDonalds and Chipotle, but not Bill’s Burgers or Dick Church’s Diner or other off-brand restaurants in the state without national locations) were required to raise their minimum wage for all workers from $16 to $20 per hour, .. MORE

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Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Legislators, Technology, and Michael Crichton

By Kevin Corcoran

Macroeconomics

Fed Forecasting: AI or Markets?

By Scott Sumner

Macroeconomics

Was High Inflation Inevitable?

By Scott Sumner

Book Review

Mir McLuhanism

By Arnold Kling

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

My Weekly Reading and Viewing for May 5, 2024

By David Henderson

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

Living with the Constitution (with A.J. Jacobs)

What does it mean to live Constitutionally in the year 2024? For a start, it means getting off social media. It also means swapping a quill pen for your keyboard, and candlelight for electricity. And don’t forget the tricorn hat and musket–though maybe skip the boiled mutton. Join author A.J. Jacobs as he deep-dives with .. MORE

econtalk-podcast

Zvi Mowshowitz on AI and the Dial of Progress

The future of AI keeps Zvi Mowshowitz up at night. He also wonders why so many smart people seem to think that AI is more likely to save humanity than destroy it. Listen as Mowshowitz talks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about the current state of AI, the pace of AI’s development, and where–unless we take serious .. MORE

EconLog

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Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

My Weekly Reading and Viewing for May 5, 2024

First, Happy Cinco de Mayo. Now to the content. Backpage: A Blueprint for Squelching Speech by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason, April 29, 2024. Excerpt: From the beginning, this prosecution has been premised on a bogus rationale (authorities yammer on about sex trafficking though none of the defendants are charged with sex trafficking), overreaching in its scope (attempting .. MORE

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Political Power in Dune

Warning: This post, like my previous post on the subject, will involve a discussion of plot points and spoilers for the Dune series. If you haven’t seen the movies or read the books and wish to avoid spoilers, feel free to skip this one.  I recently discussed what I take from the character arc of .. MORE

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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

The Political Writings of Richard Cobden

By Richard Cobden

THE State is a severe mother. She demands from her noblest sons their intellects, their energies, and, if need be, their lives; but she is not ungrateful. The men who have guided her destinies live in grateful memory and in memory the more honoured, if to great service and lofty aims they have added disregard .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

Big Brother Is Watching You

By Rachel Ferguson

Book Review of Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, by Sarah Brayne.1 Sarah Brayne has done some excellent sociological research by spending several years embedded in the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department]-one of the most technologically advanced police departments in the country. By doing so, she has given us a chance .. MORE

Vera Smith: The Contrarian View

By Leonidas Zelmanovitz

In 1936, seven years into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was published. The culmination of Keynes’ theorizing in support of policies of manipulation of money and credit by the state in order to achieve macroeconomic equilibrium came with that book. A central bank, in that context, became .. MORE

Conversations

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A Conversation with Armen A. Alchian

Recognized as one of the most influential voices in the areas of market structure, the theory of the firm, law and economics, resource unemployment, and monetary theory and policy, in this 2001 interview, Armen Alchian (1914-2013) outlines the “UCLA tradition” of economics which he founded and explores the many unanticipated consequences of self-seeking individual behavior. .. 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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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

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

Government Policy, Macroeconomics, Taxes

Hyperinflation

Inflation is a sustained increase in the aggregate price level. Hyperinflation is very high inflation. Although the threshold is arbitrary, economists generally reserve the term “hyperinflation” to describe episodes when the monthly inflation rate is greater than 50 percent. At a monthly rate of 50 percent, an item that cost $1 on January 1 would .. MORE

Government Policy, Macroeconomics, The Marketplace

Consumer Price Indexes

Measuring prices and their rate of change accurately is central to almost every economic issue, from the conduct of monetary policy to measuring economic progress (see economic growth) over time and across countries to the cost and structure of indexed government spending programs and taxes. Most of us are familiar with the prices of many .. MORE

Quotes

Entrepreneurship does not consist of grasping a free ten-dollar which one has already discovered to be resting on one’s hand; it consists in realizing that it is in one’s hand and that it is available for grasping.

-Israel Kirzner

We live together because social organization provides the efficient means of achieving our individual objectives and not because society offers us a means of arriving at some transcendental common bliss. Politics is a process of compromising our differences, and we differ as to desired collective objectives just as we do over baskets of ordinary consumption ...

-James M. Buchanan Full Quote >>

The natural course of things cannot be entirely controlled by the impotent endeavours of man: the current is too rapid and too strong for him to stop it; and though the rules which direct it appear to have been established for the wisest and best purposes, they sometimes produce effects which shock all his natural ...

-Adam Smith Full Quote >>