March
2024

February
2024

January
2024

December
2023

March 2024

Article

Orthodox Jewish Healthcare During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Rachael Behr LaRose

The assumption commonly prevails that effective healthcare provision, especially during public health disasters like pandemics, must come from top-down authorities. Yet, this assumption overlooks the reality that local communities actively and routinely orchestrate the ...

Article

Why Protect a Rich South Korea from a Nuclear North Korea?

By Doug Bandow

As if Washington was not busy enough internationally, serious Korea analysts wonder if Northeast Asia could erupt in flames. North Korea is rewriting its constitution to drop plans for peaceful reunification with the Republic of Korea, declaring the South to be the Nort...

Book Review

Milton Friedman’s Many Battles

By Arnold Kling

Characteristically, Friedman had a contrarian take on the Washington consensus. Ironically, the turn toward markets gave new life to the classic institutions of the postwar managed economy, namely the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). No longer w...

Book Review

America’s Animal Spirits

By Samuel Gregg

A Book Review of Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street, by Jackson Lears.1 When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the young American republic in the early 1830s, he immediately noticed a deep restlessness which char...

February 2024

Article

Public Health from the People

By Byron Carson

There are many ways to privately improve public health. Such responses make use of local knowledge, entrepreneurship, and civil society and pursue standard goals of public health like controlling the spread of infectious diseases. Moreover, private responses improve ove...

Article

Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator

By Michael L. Davis

Book Review of Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis1 and Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson.2 Economists don't find people all that interesting. Many of us have friends and family, but our models and analysis are devoid of personality ...

Book Review

Setting the Record Straight on Income Inequality

By Art Carden

Book Review of The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early.1 Everyone knows inequality is growing. As a trio of economists consisting of former senator Phil Gramm, economics professor Robe...

Book Review

The Pre-Modern Order

By Arnold Kling

Pre-industrial society was characterized by low degrees of economic, political and cultural integration. By contrast, a high degree of integration in all three respects is the hallmark of modernity... Economically, modernity breeds integration by its systemat...

January 2024

Article

Who Really Gains from Billions in Economic Development Incentives?

By Russell S. Sobel

How much is it worth for a large company, such as Boeing, to build a plant in your town? How about $1 billion dollars? That's roughly the amount of so-called 'incentives' given in 2009 by the State of South Carolina to Boeing for building its plant in the Charleston are...

Article

The Fragility of Civil Society

By Richard B. McKenzie

Friedrich Hayek Philosopher-economist Friedrich Hayek remains profoundly relevant, even three decades after his death in 1992 at the age of 92. Hayek received the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics for having advanced a simple but seemingly paradoxical theme: civil societ...

Book Review

Pirate Enlightenment: Some Treasures, Some Toils

By Carly Jackson

Book Review of Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber.1 In the Preface of Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber, he states that he hopes to provide a fun read that illustrates that the pirate society of Madag...

Book Review

Social Psychology and Business

By Arnold Kling

Many of the books I've relied on most heavily were published within the last decade or so. These include Blueprint (2019), The Goodness Paradox (2019), Social (2013), The Ape That Understood the Universe (2018), The Folly of Fools (2011), Everybody Lies (2017), Why ...

December 2023

Article

John Locke: Physician, Philosopher, and Defender of Freedom

By Richard Gunderman

John Locke Bacon, Locke, and Newton—I consider them the three greatest men who have ever lived, without any exception. —Thomas Jefferson, 1789 Many people forget that John Locke was a physician, and many who know that he was a physician presume that his...

Book Review

A Pro-Market and Pro-Social Economy

By Brent Orrell and David Veldran

Book Review of The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World, by Samuel Gregg.1 In The Next American Economy (2022), Samuel Gregg provides a refreshing defense of free markets, emphasizing the need to frame the case for econo...

Book Review

The Good Life Is the One Where Anxiety Falls by the Wayside

By James Broughel

Book Review of Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life, by Emily A. Austin.1 The name Epicurus is often associated with indulgent hedonism. This stereotypical mischaracterization, which has found its way into pop culture and even into supermarket ...

Book Review

Blank Slatism vs. Old Spicism

By Arnold Kling

I will refer to these convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves. —Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature1. p. 2 "If your grandfat...