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Teacher's Corner

It’s Still Summer…

If you are anything like us, you are busy trying to maximize these last glorious days of summer. And you are probably also desperately trying to find the time to finish the pile of summer reading you planned for yourself at the beginning of summer. We are not here to help. As summer winds to .. MORE

Book Review, Kling's Corner

Economic Thought Experiments

Perhaps the oddest thing of our soon-to-be present is that while the Americans revel in their petty, internal squabbles, they will barely notice that elsewhere !!! Lights will flicker and go dark. Famine’s leathery claws will dig deep and hold tight. Access to the inputs—financial and material and labor—that define the modern world will cease .. MORE

Book Review

America’s Animal Spirits

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 characterized the Americans that he encountered. In the America witnessed by Tocqueville, … a man .. MORE

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Data and Evidence

Preferences Informed by Information

By Kevin Lavery

Economic Education

Ideas Have Consequences: Law & Economics Edition

By Jon Murphy

Economic Education

EconLog Price Theory: Let Them Eat Steak

By Bryan Cutsinger

Economic and Political Philosophy

The Liberal 19th Century

By Pierre Lemieux

Incentives

The Social Benefits of Iconoclasts

By Kevin Corcoran

Norms, Customs, and Emergent Order

Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge

Labor Market

AI Won’t Kill Work – It Will Reinvent It

By Meg Tuszynski

Competition

The Virtue of Dissent and Conversation

By Jon Murphy

EconTalk

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econtalk-extra

Regulating Rents

Many Americans are increasingly disillusioned with the ability of the free market to bring down skyrocketing housing prices. More Americans believe housing prices to be inflated by the greed of landlords and lobbyists, combined with the inability of policymakers to effectively regulate housing costs. Proof of this is that rent control has returned to the .. MORE

econtalk-extra

Space Age Utopianism

Zach Weinersmith joins EconTalk host Russ Roberts for the third time to discuss why ambitions of space exploration are unrealistic and overly optimistic, the danger of all-encompassing utopianism, and why space settlement is not like buying a hot tub. Weinersmith is a cartoonist and author/co-author of many books, including Bea Wolf, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies .. MORE

EconLog

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Economic Education

EconLog Price Theory: Let Them Eat Steak

We’re bringing back price theory with our series on Price Theory problems with Professor Bryan Cutsinger. You can see all of Cutsinger’s problems and solutions by subscribing to his EconLog RSS feed. Share your proposed solutions in the Comments. Professor Cutsinger will be present in the comments for the next couple of weeks, and we’ll post his .. MORE

Labor Market

AI Won’t Kill Work – It Will Reinvent It

It’s easy to doomscroll these days. AI, it appears, is coming for our jobs. Even occupations that were previously considered an easy path to a middle-class lifestyle, like lawyer and radiologist, may be subject to the AI chopping block. Yet these stories, despite their flashy headlines, are missing nuance. They examine the seen (and likely) .. 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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Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory

By James M. Buchanan

You face a choice. You must now decide whether to read this Preface, to read something else, to think silent thoughts, or perhaps to write a bit for yourself. The value that you place on the most attractive of these several alternatives is the cost that you must pay if you choose to read this .. MORE

Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit

By Frank H. Knight

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 this website edition. However, .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

Vera Smith: The Contrarian View

By Leonidas Zelmanovitz

In 1936, seven years into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was published. The culmination of Keynes’ theorizing in support of policies of manipulation of money and credit by the state in order to achieve macroeconomic equilibrium came with that book. A central bank, in that context, became .. MORE

Rejecting the Culture Transplant

By Arnold Kling

A book review of The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left, by Garett Jones.1 In January of 2018, President Donald Trump disparaged taking in immigrants from “[expletive] countries.” Equally dramatically, albeit more politely, in the conclusion to his recent book, The Culture Transplant,1 Garett .. MORE

Conversations

VIDEO

A Conversation with Armen A. Alchian

Recognized as one of the most influential voices in the areas of market structure, the theory of the firm, law and economics, resource unemployment, and monetary theory and policy, in this 2001 interview, Armen Alchian (1914-2013) outlines the “UCLA tradition” of economics which he founded and explores the many unanticipated consequences of self-seeking individual behavior. .. MORE

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

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

Basic Concepts

Division of Labor

Division of labor combines specialization and the partition of a complex production task into several, or many, sub-tasks. Its importance in economics lies in the fact that a given number of workers can produce far more output using division of labor compared to the same number of workers each working alone. Interestingly, this is true .. MORE

Corporations and Financial Markets , Government Policy

Research and Development

Research and development (R&D) is the creation of knowledge to be used in products or processes. Table 1 gives a summary overview of postwar U.S. R&D activity performed in industry. The first column gives privately financed R&D (PR&D) conducted in industry in billions of 1982 dollars. The second column gives the ratio of PR&D to .. MORE

Economic Regulation, Government Policy, The Economics of Special Markets

Insurance

Insurance plays a central role in the functioning of modern economies. Life insurance offers protection against the economic impact of an untimely death; health insurance covers the sometimes extraordinary costs of medical care; and bank deposits are insured by the federal government (see financial regulation). In each case, the insured pays a small premium in .. MORE

Quotes

We have never designed our economic system. We were not intelligent enough for that. We have tumbled into it and it has carried us to unforeseen heights and given rise to ambitions which may yet lead us to destroy it.

-F. A. Hayek

… millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others.

-Leonard E. Read Full Quote >>

The concept of capitalism is as an economic concept immutable; if it means anything, it means the market economy. One deprives oneself of the semantic tools to deal adequately with the problems of contemporary history and economic policies if one acquiesces in a different terminology.    

-Ludwig von Mises Full Quote >>