Articles Archive

September 2020 ISSUE

Article

How the Collapse of Communism Has Undermined Faith in American Capitalism

By Richard B. McKenzie

At their presidential campaign stops, U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren charged that American capitalism has, since the early 1970s, been "rigged" and "corrupted" by the rich and powerful for self-aggrandizement, to the detriment of middle- and lower-inc...

READ ARTICLE »

Book Review

Liberty’s Discontents

By Arnold Kling

[t]he idea of decline consists of two distinct traditions. For every Western intellectual who dreads the collapse of his own society (like Henry Adams or Arnold Toynbee or Paul Kennedy or Charles Murray), there is another who has looked forward to the event with g...

READ ARTICLE »

Book Review

What’s the Economist’s Point of View?

By Adam Martin

A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Economic Point of View: An Essay on the History of Economic Thought, by Israel Kirzner.1 What is economics, really? One popular answer to this question is: who cares? Economics is what economists do. Frank Knight famou...

READ ARTICLE »

Book Review

Love and Economics

By Liya Palagashvili

A Book Review of Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Economics I Learned from Online Dating, by Paul Oyer.1 Match.com, eHarmony, and OkCupid, it turns out, are no different from eBay or Monster.com. On all these sites, people come together trying...

READ ARTICLE »

August 2020 ISSUE

Article

Missing: Entrepreneurship in Economic Education

By Russell S. Sobel

Traditional neoclassical microeconomics presents a very lengthy and rigorous treatment of business firms operating in markets with different levels of competition. Economics professors test their students' knowledge about this material mostly with equations, graphs, and mathematical conditions. While these models are n...

Book Review

Economists Waging War

By David R. Henderson

A Book Review of Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose World Wars, by Alan Bollard.1 Most economists go through their lives wondering if any of their work has had an effect on the world beyond academe. The seven economists that Alan Bollard writes about in Economists at War probabl...

Book Review

Twilight of the Bourgeoisie

By Arnold Kling

The new urban paradigm is what Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, famously labeled a "luxury city," built around the preferences of his ultra-rich compadres. But within the dominant cities are clear divisions by class, education, and sometimes race. The wealthy live in safe, gentrified areas, while the po...

Book Review

Put Away the Puppets

By Maria Pia Paganelli

A Book Review of Escaping Paternalism: Rationality, Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy, by Mario J. Rizzo and Glen Whitman.1 Are you saving enough for retirement? How do you know? How can I tell? What if there is a benchmark against which to compare your savings? If you meet it, all is well. But what if y...

July 2020 ISSUE

Article

The Danger of Benevolent Paternalism: Socializatio...

By Gina Miller Johnson

From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been calls from the American public for federal and state governments to combat the spread of the virus. These calls may seem quite innocuous and unsurprising, but they represent a dangerous trend in U.S. culture. Specifically, these calls for government action h...

Article

How Can Economists Help?

By Michael L. Davis

Russ Roberts claims that if someone asks whether he's a doctor, he tells them "yes, but not the kind that helps people." That's not true; Russ has helped me a lot. I've been a regular listener of Econtalk for many years. I can't tell you how many books I've read after listening to one of his author interviews, but it ...

Book Review

Appealing to Empathy to Overcome Polarization

By Arnold Kling

When 66 million Democrats and 69 million Republicans lost their empathy toward each other, lack of civility, loathing and anger erupted, resulting in a partisan power struggle with no brakes or constraint that has been eroding the guardrails of our democracy. —René H. Levy, Mending America's Political Divide:...