By Roger Donway
When a business exploits political interventionism for profit, several terms may be used to describe the undertaking. If one is looking at the exploitation from the perspective of political science—and perceives the behavior as a special-interest group corrupting impa...
By Caroline Breashears
Review of We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Modern Library Classics. July 11, 2006. First written 1921.1 Decades before Gene Roddenberry launched the U.S.S. Enterprise, Yevgeny Zamyatin imagined the maiden voyage of INTEGRAL, a spaceship designed to carry the odes...
By Arnold Kling
... people see minds in terms of two fundamentally different factors, sets of mental abilities we label experience and agency. The experience factor captures the ability to have an inner life, to have feelings and experiences. It includes the capacities for...
By Craig J. Richardson and Richard B. McKenzie
President Biden is crisscrossing the country, pitching his "American Families Plan" at various town halls and press conferences. The White House plan promises to "create millions of new jobs, rebuild the country's infrastructure… and (help) families cover basic expens...
By Alberto Mingardi
A Book Review of Immigration and Freedom, by Chandran Kukathas.1 Freedom is "in some way a very ordinary thing, consisting in not being hindered or obstructed in the pursuit of our everyday ends, or watched as we go about our business, or prevented from associati...
By Arnold Kling
All countries and cultures have three basic institutions. There is the economy, which is about the creation and distribution of wealth. There is the state, which is about the legitimization and distribution of power. And there is the moral system, which is the voi...
By Nils Karlson
Book Review of The Poor and the Plutocrats: From the Poorest of the Poor to the Richest of the Rich (Oxford University Press 2021) by Francis Teal.1 Is inequality a problem? Many people seem to think so, if we judge the public discussions in Europe and the Un...
By Caleb Fuller
Carl Menger Is 1871 the most important year in the history of social science? I think so. That year, Austrian financial journalist Carl Menger published his Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre—or Principles of Economics. Later that year another eminent British ec...
By Sarah Skwire
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Areopagitica and Other Political Writings of John Milton.1 What does it take for a book to get banned? The Newbery Award-winning children's book, The Higher Power of Lucky, has been the center of a storm of this kind of d...
By Arnold Kling
System noise, that is, unwanted variability in judgments that should ideally be identical, can create rampant injustice, high economic costs, and errors of many kinds. —Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. S...
By Elaine Sternberg
According to Nobel Laureate economist James Buchanan (1977, p.96): ... there is only one principle in economics that is worth stressing.... Apart from this principle there would be no basis for general public support for economics as a legitimate academic disci...
By Maria Pia Paganelli
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, act...
By Arnold Kling
The membership payers do not pay to get news for themselves (they already know the news). ... They require newsrooms to operate with values, not news. This slowly forces journalism to mutate into crowdfunded propaganda—postjournalism. ... Classical...
