Finance, Risk, Uncertainty, Probability Theory, Money, Banking, Monetary Policy, Regulation
Book Review, Liberty Classics
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, by Ludwig von Mises.1 Can government intervention work? The answer to this question is concisely, yet comprehensively answered in Ludwig von Mises’s Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, first written in German in 1940 and originally translated by Thomas Francis McManus and Heinrich Bund. According to Mises, .. MORE
Book Review, Kling's Corner
… people see minds in terms of two fundamentally different factors, sets of mental abilities we label experience and agency. The experience factor captures the ability to have an inner life, to have feelings and experiences. It includes the capacities for hunger, fear, pain, pleasure, rage, and desire, as well as personality, consciousness, pride, embarrassment, .. MORE
Featured Article
In 1960, Ronald Coase published what would become one of the most cited articles in economics and contribute to his receipt of a Nobel Prize. Coase’s point was both simple and revolutionary. First, he noted, externalities—costs from economic activity borne by people not directly involved in that activity—are reciprocal: for example, a factory’s pollution that .. MORE
Supply-side Economics
Finance, Risk, Uncertainty, Probability Theory
Politics and Economics
Economic and Political Philosophy
Business Economics
Economic Growth
Monetary Policy
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
econtalk-extra
One of the best experiences of academic growth that I had was because of my high school English teacher who took time to write specific comments on my essays. Back in the 2000’s when typing a paper required a human, I wrote those essays myself in Word on a boxy desktop computer. My teacher, of .. MORE
econtalk-extra
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
Economic and Political Philosophy
Expressing a contradiction can show plain ignorance or cognitive impairment. It can also suggest a hypothesis or theory that explains the contradiction away. Consider a current example. On the one hand, President Donald Trump argued that he would be a fool not to accept from a foreign autocrat the gift of a $400-million airplane (“Republicans .. MORE
Business Economics
German Censorship Highlights Europe’s Eroding Free Speech Protections by J.D. Tuccille, Reason, May 12, 2025. Excerpt: Putting the main opposition party under an “extremist” designation subject to surveillance is a frightening step for a democracy. “One of the things I appreciate about America is that when the federal government attacks free speech there’s instant pushback .. MORE
Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.
THE tremendous expansion of credit during and since the World War to finance military operations as well as post-war reparations, reconstruction, and the rebuilding of industry and trade has brought the problems of capitalism and the nature and origin of interest home afresh to the minds of business men as well as to economists. This .. MORE
The theory of spontaneous order has a long tradition in the history of social thought, yet it would be true to say that, until the last decade, it was all but eclipsed in the social science of the twentieth century. For much of this period the idea of spontaneous order—that most of those things of .. MORE
A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.1 First published sixty years ago this year, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock‘s The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy is widely recognized as a seminal work in the development of the .. MORE
Book Review of In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace, by Christopher J. Coyne.1 According to Ludwig von Mises, “economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics” ([1949] 2007, p. .. MORE
VIDEO
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
The twentieth century witnessed the unparalleled expansion of government power over the lives and livelihoods of individuals. Much of this was the result of two devastating world wars and totalitarian ideologies that directly challenged individual liberty and the free institutions of the open society. Other forms of expansion in the provision of social welfare and .. 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.
Of the array of creative financing techniques that came of age in the eighties, one that emerged from that tumultuous decade with its reputation intact is asset securitization. Asset-backed securities enable depository institutions, finance companies, and other corporations to “liquefy” their balance sheets (i.e., raise cash by borrowing against assets) and develop new sources of .. MORE
The federal government has increasingly assumed responsibility for reducing poverty in America. Its primary approach is to expand programs that transfer wealth, supposedly from the better off to the poor. In 1962, federal transfers to individuals (not counting payments for goods and services provided or interest for money loaned) amounted to 5.2 percent of gross .. MORE
“ Insider trading” refers to transactions in a company’s securities, such as stocks or options, by corporate insiders or their associates based on information originating within the firm that would, once publicly disclosed, affect the prices of such securities. Corporate insiders are individuals whose employment with the firm (as executives, directors, or sometimes rank-and-file employees) .. MORE
-Elinor Ostrom
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