Book Review
An Economist Looks at Europe, Article
Two years ago, Dennis Rasmussen published a book that he says “was an absolute joy to write” and indeed is a joy to read: The Infidel and the Professor. It is the biography of a “Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought”, as the subtitle explains. This deceptively anecdotal story of how David Hume and Adam Smith .. MORE
Thinking Straight
Time Preference and Market Responses It is common in economic literature to use the term “time preference” to mean a preference for the present over the future. However, this need not be the case. It is counterfactual, but literally true, that if the future is preferred over the present, the marginal holders of present scarce .. MORE
Book Review, Kling's Corner
… digital media not only enhance information exchange and render offline life obsolete—they also reverse literacy and retrieve orality. … This book is about orality, which once was obsolesced by writing, and about literacy, which is now becoming obsolesced by digital media. —Andrey Mir, Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s .. MORE
Economic Education
Book Review
Artificial Intelligence
Economic Theory
Incentives
Philosophy and Methodology
Economic Education
Economic Institutions
Economic Theory
econtalk-podcast
What do Shakespeare, Hollywood storytelling, and military special operations have in common? They all excel at inventing new plans, or improvising when we’re facing radical uncertainty. Listen as professor of story science Angus Fletcher tells EconTalk’s Russ Roberts how we’ve misdefined intelligence, equating it with data–driven reasoning in place of what he calls “primal intelligence”–the .. MORE
econtalk-extra
What would you describe as beautiful about a prison? To me, that seems a difficult question. Yet in this episode, returning guest Dwayne Betts helped me to see just how much there- or at least could be. Betts sat down with EconTalk host Russ Roberts to talk beauty, offer an update on his ambitious project .. MORE
Economic Education
When I first started teaching, David Henderson gave me some advice: to be open about who I am regarding my economic philosophy. At the beginning of class (and several other times throughout), I mention that I am a classical liberal—a free-market economist who argues that individuals rather than governments are best suited to deal with .. MORE
Economic Growth
Today, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University), Philippe Aghion (London School of Economics), and Peter Howitt (Brown University) “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth.”1 This follows a recent trend for the Committee to award to economics focused on economic growth, following Acemoglou, Johnson, and Robinson in 2024 and Kremer, .. MORE
Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.
In this book I first endeavor to trace, in a series of studies of the contemporary source-material, the evolution of the modern “orthodox” theory of international trade, from its beginnings in the revolt against English mercantilism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through the English currency and tariff controversies of the nineteenth century, to its .. MORE
Charles Mackay, Scottish poet, journalist, and editor was best known in his day for his verses, some of which were set to music. His book, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, was first published in 1841 (London: Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty), with a promise of additional material “should these be .. MORE
A Book Review of The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, by Thomas Philippon.1 The Great Reversal defends a provocative and surprising thesis: the United States has given up on free markets while Europe has embraced them. As a result, Europeans pay less and get more in a lot of industries, like .. MORE
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
VIDEO
Gary Becker (1930-2014) was one of the most original and pathbreaking economists of modern times. His 1992 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences was described as his “having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behavior.” Becker’s early work on discrimination led to his further work .. MORE
VIDEO
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
Econlib Videos
Conversations with some of the most original thinkers of our time
The Reading Lists by Topic pages contain some suggested readings organized by topic, including materials available on Econlib. Brief reviews or descriptions are included for many items.
Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.
These free resources are appropriate for teachers of high school and AP economics, social studies, and history classes. They are also appropriate for interested students, home schoolers, and newcomers to the topic of economics.
A tariff is a fancy word for a tax. The term usually refers to import duties, which are fees levied on goods entering one country from another. Import tariffs have been a controversial feature of domestic politics, international diplomacy, and economic policy for centuries. This article covers some of the basic economics of tariffs as .. MORE
[Editor’s note: this article was written in 1992.] To the outside world, the Soviet Union seemed little different in 1984 from what it had been for at least a decade. Except for a few skeptics, almost everyone agreed that the Soviet Union was the world’s second-largest economy and, if not the most powerful military force .. MORE
Social Security, or, to be precise, Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI), is the U.S. government program that pays benefits to workers after retirement, to spouses and children of deceased workers, and to workers who become disabled before they retire. In 2003, the program had 47 million recipients, of whom 32.6 million were retired .. MORE
-Milton and Rose Friedman
-James M. Buchanan Full Quote >>
-Frederic Bastiat Full Quote >>