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Book Review, Kling's Corner

Balaji-land: Getting From Here to There

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that .. MORE

Book Review, Kling's Corner

Phools and Their Money

Economists give high moral status to transactions between consenting adults. We presume that such exchanges make both parties better off. In Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation & Deception,1George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller challenge that presumption. They argue that the natural outcome of markets is for clever entrepreneurs to discover ways to .. 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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Free Markets

Problems with Progressivism and Populism

By Scott Sumner

Economic and Political Philosophy

Are You a Product?

By Pierre Lemieux

Energy, Environment, Resources

My Weekly Reading for May 19, 2024

By David Henderson

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Beneath the Mask

By Jon Murphy

Family Economics

Population and Density

By Scott Sumner

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

“Junk Fees” Typically Serve an Important Purpose

By David Henderson

Data and Evidence

Slow Down and THINK

By Amy Willis

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

Robert Shiller on Narrative Economics

Economist, author, and Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller of Yale University discusses his book Narrative Economics with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Shiller proposes a novel idea–that the narratives that people believe and use to understand the world affect their economic behavior and in turn affect the macroeconomy. Shiller argues that taking these psychological effects into account .. MORE

econtalk-podcast

John Horgan on Mind-Body Problems

Science journalist and author John Horgan talks about his book, Mind-Body Problems, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Horgan interviewed an array of scientists, philosophers, and others who have worked on consciousness, free-will, and what it means to be human. Horgan argues that no single solution to the problems in these areas is likely to be .. MORE

EconLog

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Energy, Environment, Resources

My Weekly Reading for May 19, 2024

Brickbat: Robot’s Day of Rest by Charles Oliver, Reason, May 10, 2024. Excerpt: A German court has ruled that the robots at the Tegut supermarket chain must be given Sundays off, just like human workers. Under German law, retail stores must close on Sundays and Christian holidays in order to give employees a day of rest. Tegut .. MORE

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

“Junk Fees” Typically Serve an Important Purpose

  Charging extra for specific preferences, such as a seat selection on a flight, enables lower basic prices, increasing access to no-frills options for lower-income customers, while allowing businesses to customize their services to individual customers’ preferences. Airlines unbundle in-flight food and checked bags, for example, leading to more profit opportunities and lower base fares. .. MORE

LIBERTY CLASSICS SERIES

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continued relevance of our classic titles.

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Book Titles

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Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden

By Richard Cobden

The Speeches contained in these two volumes have been selected and edited at the instance of the Club which was established for the purpose of inculcating and extending those political principles which are permanently identified with Cobden’s career. They form an important part of the collective contribution to political science, which has conferred on their .. MORE

Pictures of the Socialistic Future

By Eugene Richter

Eugene Richter (1838-1906) was a member of a generation of classical liberals who died between the turn of the 19th century and the First World War. This generation included the French economist Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), the English sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the English historian Lord Acton (1834-1902), the English radical individualist Auberon Herbert (1838-1906), .. 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

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

Conversations

VIDEO

A Conversation with Milton Friedman

Recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) has long been recognized as one of our most important economic thinkers and a leader of the Chicago school of economics. He is the author of many books and articles in economics, including A Theory of the Consumption Function and A Monetary History .. 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

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Conversations with some of the most original thinkers of our time

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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

Economies Outside the United States, Government Policy, International Economics, Macroeconomics

International Capital Flows

International capital flows are the financial side of international trade.1 When someone imports a good or service, the buyer (the importer) gives the seller (the exporter) a monetary payment, just as in domestic transactions. If total exports were equal to total imports, these monetary transactions would balance at net zero: people in the country would .. MORE

Economic Regulation, Government Policy

Rent Control

New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act—also known as rent control—as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the 2003 war in Iraq, however, or the Vietnam War; it is World War II. That is when rent control started in .. MORE

Economic Regulation, Government Policy, Labor

Immigration

Immigration is once again a major component of demographic change in the United States. Since 1940, the number of legal immigrants increased at a rate of one million per decade. By 2002, approximately one million legal immigrants were being admitted each year, a rate of almost ten million for the decade (Table 1). Large numbers .. MORE

Quotes

As a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.

-Joseph Alois Schumpeter

No one has a right to thrust himself into the affairs of others in order to further their interest, and no one ought, when he has his own interests in view, to pretend that he is acting selflessly only in the interest of others.

-Ludwig von Mises Full Quote >>

To balance a large state or society, whether monarchical or republican, on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able, by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it.

-David Hume Full Quote >>