Game theory is the science of strategy. It attempts to determine mathematically and logically the actions that “players” should take to secure the best outcomes for themselves in a wide array of “games.” The games it studies range from chess to child rearing and from tennis to takeovers. But the games all share the common […]
The Library of Economics and Liberty carries the popular Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, edited by David R. Henderson.
This highly acclaimed economics encyclopedia was first published in 1993 under the title The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. It features easy-to-read articles by over 150 top economists, including Nobel Prize winners, over 80 biographies of famous economists, and many tables and charts illustrating economics in action. With David R. Henderson’s permission and encouragement, the Econlib edition of this work includes links, additions, and corrections.
National defense is in many ways a public, or “collective,” good, which means two things. First, consumption of the good by one person does not reduce the amount available for others to consume. Thus, all people in a nation must “consume” the same amount of national defense (the defense policies implemented by the government), although […]
General economic principles govern the arts. Most important, artists use scarce means to achieve ends—and therefore recognize trade-offs, the defining aspects of economic behavior. Also, many other economic aspects of the arts make the arts similar to the more typical goods and services that economists analyze. As in other economic sectors, marketplace exchange provides more […]
The average U.S. consumer now enjoys a larger and higher-quality home than ever before. In 2001, the average home was 1,693 square feet, while in 1960 it was less than 1,200 square feet. In 2001, 58 percent of homes had three or more bedrooms, and 57 percent had 1.5 or more bathrooms. Compare that with […]
The U.S. welfare system would be an unlikely model for anyone designing a welfare system from scratch. The dozens of programs that make up the “system” have different (sometimes competing) goals, inconsistent rules, and over-lapping groups of beneficiaries. Responsibility for administering the various programs is spread throughout the executive branch of the federal government and […]
Partly because of the economy-wide effects of money and banking, and partly because of the specific government policies that regulate the money supply and banking, there is a separate category to cover these issues.
These entries are on various aspects of the labor market and include discrimination, the gender gap, immigration, job safety, and wages and working conditions.
Governments impose a variety of taxes. The analysis of taxes, therefore, requires multiple entries, including marginal tax rates, corporate taxation, and capital gains taxes.
This category ranges widely over various government policies, but mainly covers economy-wide policies on taxes, government spending, government debt and deficits, redistribution, welfare, and monetary policy.
In 2009, Elinor Ostrom, along with oliver e. williamson, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Ostrom, the only woman to ever win the prize, received it “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” She demonstrated “how local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any regulation by central authorities […]
Separately but almost simultaneously with William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger, French economist Leon Walras developed the idea of marginal utility and is thus considered one of the founders of the “marginal revolution.” But Walras’s biggest contribution was in what is now called general equilibrium theory. Before Walras, economists had made little attempt to show […]