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Book Review

A Grand Tour with Adam Smith

A Book Review of Adam Smith in Toulouse and Occitania: The Unknown Years, by Alain Alcouffe and Philippe Massot-Bordenave.1 Adam Smith in Toulouse and Occitania: The Unknown Years is not a book for everyone. It is not an introduction to the life or the works of Adam Smith. It is not even a traditional biography .. MORE

Book Review

What’s a Parent to Do?

A Book Review of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt.1 When an academic writes a book for a popular audience, one of their main goals is to have an impact on the world. Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation is clearly .. MORE

Book Review

Nature by the Numbers

A Book Review of Pricing the Priceless: A History of Environmental Economics, by H. Spencer Banzhaf.1 How do you price scarce and valuable resources that are not traded in a market? Before answering that question, one may need to ask: why do we want to price those resources? In Spencer Banzhaf’s account of the history .. MORE

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Taxation

What Is A Value Added Tax?

By Pierre Lemieux

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

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

Elizabeth Anderson on Worker Rights and Private Government

Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson of the University of Michigan and author of Private Government talks about her book with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Anderson argues that employers have excessive power over employees that we would never accept from government authority. Topics discussed include the role of competition in potentially mitigating employer control, whether some worker rights .. MORE

econtalk-extra

Confronting our Unicorns

Is “real” capitalism inherently unstable? Have we been so worried about the “road to serfdom” that we’ve missed the road to crony capitalism? Are there any sectors of the American economy that are not crony-ized? Have we lost all sense of the concept of character? In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes back one of your .. MORE

EconLog

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Economic Education

Ideas Have Consequences: Law & Economics Edition

A new paper by Elliot Ash (ETH Zurich), Daniel L Chen (Toulouse School of Economics), and Suresh Naidu (Columbia University) in the Quarterly Journal of Economics discusses the impact of the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges on judicial rulings (“Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice“).  From their abstract: .. MORE

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

LIBERTY CLASSICS SERIES

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

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Book Titles

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An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

By Jeremy Bentham

The First Edition of this work was printed in the year 1780; and first published in 1789. The present Edition is a careful reprint of ‘A New Edition, corrected by the Author,’ which was published in 1823.

Elements of Political Economy

By James Mill

There are few things of which I have occasion to advertize the reader, before he enters upon the perusal of the following work.My object has been to compose a school-book of Political Economy, to detach the essential principles of the science from all extraneous topics, to state the propositions clearly and in their logical order, .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

Work, Wages, and Capitalism

By Stephen Davies

A Book Review of The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind, by Jan Lucassen.1 As the subtitle suggests, Jan Lucassen’s massive work of scholarship is ambitious in scope and scale. The entire sweep of human history and the whole of the planet are its canvas and the story it tells and the analysis .. MORE

The War That Never Ends

By Nathan Goodman

A Book Review of Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall.1 It’s been over 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. Ever since those horrible attacks, the United States government has been waging a “war on terror” both at home and abroad. The war on .. MORE

Conversations

VIDEO

A Conversation with Harold Demsetz

A professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and a primary figure in Chicago School Economics and in the field of Law and Economics, Harold Demsetz has contributed original research on the theory of the firm, regulation in markets, industrial organization, antitrust policy, transaction costs, externalities, and .. MORE

VIDEO

Capitalism, Government, and the Good Society

On April 10, 2013, Liberty Fund and Butler University sponsored a symposium, “Capitalism, Government, and the Good Society.” The evening began with solo presentations by the three participants–Michael Munger of Duke University, Robert Skidelsky of the University of Warwick, and Richard Epstein of New York University. (Travel complications forced the fourth invited participant, James Galbraith .. 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

Corporations and Financial Markets , Economic History

The 2008 Financial Crisis

It was, according to accounts filtering out of the White House, an extraordinary scene. Hank Paulson, the U.S. treasury secretary and a man with a personal fortune estimated at $700m (£380m), had got down on one knee before the most powerful woman in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, and begged her to save his plan to rescue .. MORE

Taxes, Government Policy

Progressive Taxes

If, as Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, taxes are the price we pay for civilized society, then the progressivity of taxes largely determines how that price varies among individuals. A progressive tax structure is one in which an individual or family’s tax liability as a fraction of income rises with income. If, for example, taxes .. MORE

Economic Regulation, Economies Outside the United States, The Economics of Special Markets, The Marketplace

OPEC

Few observers and even few experts remember that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was created in response to the 1959 imposition of import quotas on crude oil and refined products by the United States. In 1959, the U.S. government established the Mandatory Oil Import Quota program (MOIP), which restricted the amount of imported .. MORE

Quotes

The regard for the laws of nations, or for those rules which independent states profess or pretend to think themselves bound to observe in their dealings with one another, is often very little more than mere pretence and profession.

-Adam Smith

Insofar as man is wise or good, his ‘character’ is acquired chiefly by posing as better than he is, until a part of his pretense becomes a habit.

-Frank Knight Full Quote >>

The propriety of our moral sentiments is never so apt to be corrupted, as when the indulgent and partial spectator is at hand, while the indifferent and impartial one is at a great distance.  

-Adam Smith Full Quote >>