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Article, Book Review

Misanthropy Springs from the Lust for Power: H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells Best known today for science fiction novels such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells was in his own day widely regarded as a prophet. Trained in science, he predicted the wireless telephone, directed energy weapons such as the laser, and the production of human-animal .. MORE

Article

California Dreaming: The Effects of California’s “Fast Food” Minimum Wage

On April 1 of this year, California fast-food restaurant chains with sixty or more national locations (for example, McDonalds and Chipotle, but not Bill’s Burgers or Dick Church’s Diner or other off-brand restaurants in the state without national locations) were required to raise their minimum wage for all workers from $16 to $20 per hour, .. MORE

Book Review

When Searching for Monsters to Destroy, What Do We Fail to Discover?

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

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Economic Growth

Good News on Income

By Jon Murphy

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

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

Eating with Intelligence (with Julia Belluz)

Losing weight should be simple: eat less, exercise more. But according to author and health journalist Julia Belluz, it’s complicated. Listen as Belluz talks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about her new book, Food Intelligence. Belluz argues that a calorie is pretty much a calorie whether it’s carbs or fat. Keeping calories under control is often .. MORE

econtalk-extra

Parent by Number

It seems parenting has become an ever-greater challenge in our age of anxiety. We have more information than ever, but this seems to render decision-making harder than ever. In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes back Emily Oster to talk about her book, Cribsheet. Oster hopes her deep dive into the data about parenting .. MORE

EconLog

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#ReadWithMe

Evaluating We Have Never Been Woke, Part 3: Economics

In his book We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi examines the worldview of symbolic capitalists in great detail. Much of what he describes looks very familiar to me (although the fact that I see the behavior al-Gharbi describes so regularly is itself something I consider as having very little weight as evidence — I’ll .. MORE

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

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continued relevance of our classic titles.

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Democratick Editorials: Essays in Jacksonian Political Economy

By William Leggett

Ten years after Thomas Jefferson’s death in 1826, an outspoken young editor in New York City was reformulating and extending the Jeffersonian philosophy of equal rights. William Leggett, articulating his views in the columns of the New York Evening Post,Examiner, and Plaindealer, gained widespread recognition as the intellectual leader of the laissez-faire wing of Jacksonian .. MORE

The Coal Question

By William Stanley Jevons

I AM desirous of prefixing to the second edition of the following work a few explanations which may tend to prevent misapprehension of its purpose and conclusions.The expression “exhaustion of our coal mines,” states the subject in the briefest form, but is sure to convey erroneous notions to those who do not reflect upon the .. 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 Armen A. Alchian

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

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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Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.

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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

Private enterprise has produced the wealth of the world; yet it has suffered more calumny and obloquy than any other system. Its alternative, state economy, has retarded the production of wealth; yet it has been lauded and deified. “Corrigible Capitalism, Incorrigible Socialism”

-Arthur Seldon

… what a strong motive is this, to increase our frugality of public money; lest for want of it, we be reduced, by the multiplicity of taxes, or what is worse, by our public impotence and inability for defence, to curse our very liberty…

-David Hume Full Quote >>

Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

-Adam Smith Full Quote >>