Featured Articles

Featured Article

The Private Production of Roads

Most Americans recognize the efficiency of private enterprise in providing goods such as computers and cars. Yet for various reasons, when it comes to roads, most people recoil from the idea of private production. Indeed, many people think that one of the essential functions of government, in addition to other tasks such as coining money .. MORE

Book Review

Love and Economics

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 to find matches. —Paul Oyer, Everything I Ever Needed to Know About .. MORE

Book Review, Kling's Corner

Milton Friedman’s Many Battles

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 working to stabilize a gold-backed currency, the two international organizations offered loans to emerging economies—typically conditional .. MORE

Most Recent

Labor Market

AI Won’t Kill Work – It Will Reinvent It

By Meg Tuszynski

Competition

The Virtue of Dissent and Conversation

By Jon Murphy

Cross-country Comparisons

Changing Opinions on America

By Pierre Lemieux

Business Economics

The Problem with Government-Run Grocery Stores

By Peter Jacobsen

Economic Methods

The Measurement is Not the Thing

By Jon Murphy

Information Goods, Intellectual Property

The Anthropic Settlement: A $1.5 Billion Precedent for AI and Copyright

By Joy Buchanan

Business Economics

Bicycles Before Business

By Alvin Rabushka

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

The Deceptive Power of Maps (with Paulina Rowinska)

How can the state of Colorado have nearly 700 sides? Why is a country’s coastline as long as you want it to be? And how is it that your UPS driver has more routes to choose from than there are stars in the universe? Listen as mathematician Paulina Rowinska talks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about .. MORE

econtalk-podcast

How Did America Build the Arsenal of Democracy? (with Brian Potter)

American manufacturing of aircraft during WWII dwarfed that of its enemies. By the end of the war, an American assembly line was producing a B-24 bomber in less than an hour. But that success was far from inevitable. Structural engineer and writer Brian Potter speaks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about the logistical challenges of ramping up .. MORE

EconLog

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Economic Growth

Cardwell’s Cage and How to Break Free

Donald Cardwell, a British historian of science and technology, famously observed that “no nation has been very creative for more than an historically short period.” Known as Cardwell’s Law, this dictum haunts many people concerned about the future of innovation. Can the United States, or any other country, break free of the cage of Cardwell’s .. MORE

Business Economics

Big Tech Antitrust: Postelection Edition

US antitrust enforcement is likely to change in the new administration. However, it is also likely that the antitrust cases against big tech firms – and concerns about their effects on society – will continue. Over the past years, countries all around the world have passed or are considering new laws which antitrust authorities can .. MORE

LIBERTY CLASSICS SERIES

Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.

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Book Titles

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The Theory of Money and Credit

By Ludwig Mises

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) first published The Theory of Money and Credit in German, in 1912. The edition presented here is that published by Liberty Fund in 1980, which was translated from the German by H. E. Batson originally in 1934, with additions in 1953. Only a few corrections of obvious typos were made for .. MORE

Public Finance

By Charles F. Bastable

In preparing this edition (which has been seriously delayed owing to pressure of other work) it has been my aim, while preserving the general character of the book, to give due place to the various recent contributions to financial theory and to the latest developments of fiscal policy in the leading countries of the world…. .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

It Was All So Unlikely: Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope

By Mark C. Schug

A review of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the American Story by Wilfred McClay.1 American history isn’t what it used to be. Once it was common for a history textbook author to tell a good story. I remember as an eighth-grade student being horrified that my teacher was going to toss out a bunch .. MORE

When Searching for Monsters to Destroy, What Do We Fail to Discover?

By Rosolino Candela

Book Review of In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace, by Christopher J. Coyne.1 According to Ludwig von Mises, “economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics” ([1949] 2007, p. .. MORE

Conversations

VIDEO

A Conversation with James M. Buchanan, Parts I and II

Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Universally respected as one of the founders of the economics of public choice, he is the author of numerous books and hundreds of articles in the areas of public finance, public choice, constitutional economics, and economic .. MORE

VIDEO

A Conversation with Israel Kirzner

Israel Kirzner, Professor Emeritus at NYU, is among the foremost scholars in the continuing development of the Austrian school of economic theory. He has extended our understanding of the workings of a free society, illuminated the role of entrepreneurs in the process of economic discovery, and shed new light on the dynamics of market forces. .. MORE

Econlib Videos

Intellectual Portrait Series

Conversations with some of the most original thinkers of our time

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Guides

College Economics Topics

Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.

Economist Biographies

From the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Economic History, Government Policy, Taxes

Taxation

In recent years, taxation has been one of the most prominent and controversial topics in economic policy. Taxation has been a principal issue in every presidential election since 1980—with a large tax cut as a winning issue in 1980, a pledge of “Read my lips: no new taxes” in the 1988 campaign, and a statement .. MORE

Basic Concepts, Macroeconomics

Recessions

One of the most popular definitions of recessions is that they are periods when real gross national product (GNP) has declined for at least two consecutive quarters. In 1990, real GNP declined between the third and fourth quarters and again between the fourth quarter of 1990 and the first quarter of 1991. Hence, there is .. MORE

Government Policy, Macroeconomics

Fiscal Sustainability

The population of wealthy countries is getting much older. Between 2005 and 2035, the number of elderly in wealthy countries will more than double, but the number of workers will barely change. This historically unprecedented demographic change portends enormous fiscal stresses because of the high and growing cost of meeting government pension and health-care commitments .. MORE

Quotes

“…money is the more requisite, the more civilized a nation is, and the further it has carried the division of labour.”

-Jean-Baptiste Say

Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power ...

-John Stuart Mill Full Quote >>

“Because they believed the pursuit of wealth to be characterized by self-interest, and because the conceived of economics as studying the phenomena of wealth, the classical writers made use of the concept of selfishness in their analysis. But this selfishness was only incidental to the real object of study. In no way did economics, as ...

-Israel Kirzner Full Quote >>