There are two versions of Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population. The first, published anonymously in 1798, was so successful that Malthus soon elaborated on it under his real name. * The rewrite, culminating in the sixth edition of 1826, was a scholarly expansion and generalization of the first...
Sep 7 2020
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 famously quipped, in response to this attitude, "and economis...
In June 1974 the Institute for Humane Studies sponsored the first of a series of conferences on Austrian economics. This conference was held at Royalton College in South Royalton, Vermont, and attracted some fifty participants from all regions of the United States and three continents abroad. The conferees came to hear...
May 2 2022
A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, edited by Edwin Dolan.1 What's so Austrian about "Austrian economics?" The label was originally a pejorative, coined by Gustav Schmoller, a harsh critic of Carl Menger's work. It was an attempt to attach Menger's ideas to a "provinc...
In 1884 The Fabian Society was founded in England with the aim of bringing about a socialist society by means of intellectual debate, the publication of books and pamphlets, and the "permeation" of socialist ideas into the universities, the press, government institutions, and political parties. This was in marked contr...
Socialism—defined as a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production—was the tragic failure of the twentieth century. Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral defects of capitalism, it has far surpassed capitalism in both economic malfunction and moral cruelty. Yet ...
The text has been altered as little as possible from the original edition ( Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, Frank H. Knight, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Economics in the State University of Iowa; Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press, 1921).A few corrections of obvious typos were made for thi...
Frank H. Knight was one of the founders of the so-called Chicago school of economics, of which milton friedman and george stigler were the leading members from the 1950s to the 1980s. Knight made his reputation with his book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, which was based on his Ph.D. dissertation. In it Knight set out ...
So influential was John Maynard Keynes in the middle third of the twentieth century that an entire school of modern thought bears his name. Many of his ideas were revolutionary; almost all were controversial. Keynesian economics serves as a sort of yardstick that can define virtually all economists ...
Snippet: What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, ...
The twentieth century witnessed the unparalleled expansion of government power over the lives and livelihoods of individuals. Much of this was the result of two devastating world wars and totalitarian ideologies that directly challenged individual liberty and the free institutions of the open society. Other forms of ex...
If any twentieth-century economist was a Renaissance man, it was Friedrich Hayek. He made fundamental contributions in political theory, psychology, and economics. In a field in which the relevance of ideas often is eclipsed by expansions on an initial theory, many of his contributions are so remarkable that people sti...
Ricardo's book, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, was first published in 1817 (London: John Murray, Albemarle-Street), with second and third editions in quick succession.We present Ricardo's final revision, the third edition, published in 1821, here.The three different editions encompassed several s...
May 2 2022
A Book Review of Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages, by Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod.1 Introduction What do you think would happen if suddenly beards and bachelorhood were taxed? Ridiculous, you say? Not so! In the later 17th century, Tsar Peter the Great instituted a beard ta...
