By Max Borders
Most grownups don't believe in magic anymore. Sometimes, though, it can be helpful to imagine it. A powerful ring turns the wearer invisible in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. That power means the wearer can act with relative impunity. (For that device, To...
By Rosolino Candela
The year 2022 marks the 75th anniversary of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society organized by F. A. Hayek. What is particularly interesting is the fact that—as highlighted in the transcripts of that meeting recently published by Bruce Caldwell as Mont...
By Art Carden
A Book Review of The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, by Thomas Philippon.1 The Great Reversal defends a provocative and surprising thesis: the United States has given up on free markets while Europe has embraced them. As a result, Eur...
By Arnold Kling
This book is our story, an unlikely account of how two outsiders—a charter school principal and defrocked philosopher... are now fortunate to preside over one of the most successful early-stage funds in the business... in the top one or two percent of all funds in...
By Richard Gunderman
The elderly patient presented with difficulty walking. The patient was referred to an orthopedic surgeon, who traced the problem to osteoarthritis in the patient's hips, knees, and feet. An otolaryngologist saw the patient and diagnosed a malfunction of the inner ear, t...
By Arnold Kling
One main reason why rational expectations macroeconomics, in particular its implication that the Phillips Curve for anticipated changes in money is vertical even in the short run, caught on was the allegation that the incumbent Keynesian tradition had failed to eith...
By Walter Donway
In retrospect, blockchain was a long time coming, given its potential for shifting power from governments and organizations to individuals—and addressing the government regulatory mess hobbling healthcare. Blockchain technology came on the scene in 2007-8 with it...
By Pierre Lemieux
A Book Review of The Mirage of Social Justice, by Friedrich Hayek. Volume II of his Law, Legislation, and Liberty1 Published in 1976, The Mirage of Social Justice was the second volume of Friedrich Hayek's trilogy Law, Legislation, and Liberty. My review ...
By Lars Peder Nordbakken and Leonidas Zelmanovitz
Economics, as it has been taught historically, often departs from a static analysis of society in which economic activities are in perfect equilibrium. It is only after this baseline is given that more realistic assumptions are added for the economics students to be tra...
By Rosolino Candela
In recent years, fears of inflation and the possibility of recession have grabbed headlines, particularly as the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates to curb inflation. In a recent article published in The Washington Post, historian Meg Jacobs and economist Isa...
By Roger Donway
A journalist is someone who knows all the facts of a story and none of the truth. That melancholy reflection is prompted by the twentieth anniversary of Enron's historic collapse into bankruptcy: December 2, 2001. In its day, Enron's bankruptcy was the largest in U...
By Arnold Kling
Whether to have a child is what I call a wild problem—a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn't obvious, where the pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us, where the path we choose define...
By John McKenzie and Richard B. McKenzie
California (and much of the West) is in the midst of its worst multi-decade drought in maybe a millennium. Los Angeles has received only a fifth of its normal near-desert-level rainfall this year. Indeed, LA's rainfall to date in 2022 is just under the normal precipitat...
By Rosolino Candela
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, by Ludwig von Mises.1 The hallmark of a great book is its ability to stand the test of time, for its lessons to apply across place and time, and for its underlying principl...
By Stephen Davies
A Book Review of Hitler: The Politics of Seduction, by Rainer Zitelmann.1 One could truly say that there is no end to books about Adolph Hitler. Every year brings new works to add to the library already in print. This despite there being what most regard as a def...
By Arnold Kling
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart co...