October
2024

September
2024

August
2024

July
2024

October 2024

Article

Beware of Economic Misconceptions

By Arnold Kling

Herbert Stein, an economist who served in the Nixon Administration, wrote a memoir in which he looked back on his experience. He wrote that two main lessons he had learned were: 1. Economists do not know very much. 2. Other people, including politicians who make...

Article

Can We Morally Assess Business?

By Gregory Robson

It is not trite to say that businesses are only as good or as bad as their members. Businesses are, after all, human endeavors, and their success or failure depends on the competence and good will of their members. Yet the assaults on hierarchical firms and market econo...

Book Review

Capitalism, Corruption, and the Ugly Pig

By Michael Munger

Book Review of What Went Wrong with Capitalism? by Ruchir Sharma.1 Capitalism has a "Pretty Pig" problem. The reference is to a state fair livestock contest, where there is a judging of the beauty of adult swine. There are only two entrants, because adult...

Book Review

The Wrong Road to Freedom

By David R. Henderson

A Book Review of The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph E. Stiglitz.1 Introduction Columbia University economics professor Joseph E. Stiglitz has recently published a book titled The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society...

September 2024

Article

Cassandra and the Destruction of Savings

By Leonidas Zelmanovitz and Thomas Lanzi

... if we were able to adjust our accounting processes to the realities of taxpayers' obligations, the government deficit which enters into the savings of business and individuals would be offset by taxpayers' liabilities, the fiscal (revenue and expenditure) decision...

Article

Joy in Economics… and Tolstoy?

By Richard Gunderman

Frontispiece, Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. This article was inspired by a recent Virtual Reading Group on Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, led by Richard Gunderman. Learn more about our Virtual Reading Groups at the Online Library of Liberty. To what field o...

Book Review

The Price Is Right: Setting the Record Straight on Price Controls and Inflation

By James Broughel

Book Review of The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy. Ryan A. Bourne, Ed.1 Price controls have grown increasingly common across large sectors of the economy such as finance and healthcare, espec...

Book Review

The Cooperative Ape

By Arnold Kling

Unlike chimpanzees, which acquire the vast majority of their daily calorie intake from easy-to-find foods such as fruit and leaves, early humans occupied a more complex foraging niche, relying on foods they had to either extract (e.g., buried tubers, or nuts i...

August 2024

Book Review

Better Economic Maps

By Arnold Kling

Our new model incorporates several innovative features: For example, rather than using a representative household, it features a demographically accurate synthetic population with millions of households (matching age, education, race, and consumption habits). ...

Book Review

What’s a Parent to Do?

By Jeremy Horpedahl

A Book Review of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt.1 When an academic writes a book for a popular audience, one of their main goals is to have an impact on the world. Jo...

Article

Patriotism and Universal Benevolence: Are They Consistent?

By Erik W. Matson

In 1776, the British MP Soame Jenyns wrote a work titled A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion.1 The bulk of the work is an apologetic for Christian orthodoxy against the claims of skeptical deism, but it has a notable political dimension. The politi...

Book Review

Nature by the Numbers

By Maria Pia Paganelli

A Book Review of Pricing the Priceless: A History of Environmental Economics, by H. Spencer Banzhaf.1 How do you price scarce and valuable resources that are not traded in a market? Before answering that question, one may need to ask: why do we want to pr...

July 2024

Article

Rights, Restrictions, and Reality: 50 Years of Anarchy, State, and Utopia

By Aeon Skoble

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia was released in 1974, shortly after (and partly in response to) his Harvard colleague John Rawls' 1971 A Theory of Justice. Anarchy, State, and Utopia included a theory of rights and a right-based account of liberalism in the c...

Book Review

Universal Economics: Necessary Reading for the Well-Trained Economist

By Alexander William Salter

A Liberty Classics Book Review of Universal Economics, by Armen Alchian and William Allen.1 What do you do when economists stop believing in economics? The "dismal science" never merited its dreary epithet, but trends in economics education at the graduate an...

Book Review

The Religion Business

By Arnold Kling

This book is about how the world's religions have gained such power, what they do with it, and how abuses of this power can be constrained. —Paul Seabright, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People,1 p. 6 Paul Seabright's T...

Article

T.S. Eliot on Economics and Education

By Richard Gunderman

Thomas Stearns Eliot. Photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1934. Although the most illustrious honors in economics, such as the Nobel Prize, are typically awarded to specialists in the field, many of the most penetrating economic insights do not come from economists. To l...