Barry Lam, bureaucracy, externalities, legalism, rule of law, trust
Liberty Classics, Book Review, Kling's Corner
Understanding the market process as a systematic, error-corrective sequence of profit-inspired entrepreneurial discoveries, continually reshuffled and redirected as a result of the ceaseless impact of exogenous changes, should drastically alter our appreciation of key features of capitalism. —Israel M. Kirzner, Competition, Economic Planning, and the Knowledge Problem1 (page 301) This volume of the collected works .. MORE
Featured Article
Economists nearly unanimously support open and free trade among nations.1 The arguments for free trade are not new, dating back at least to Adam Smith’s famous book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 and David Hume’s series of essays, On Commerce and On the Balance of Trade .. MORE
Article
According to Nobel Laureate economist James Buchanan (1977, p.96): … there is only one principle in economics that is worth stressing…. Apart from this principle there would be no basis for general public support for economics as a legitimate academic discipline, no place for economics as an appropriate part of a liberal educational curriculum. I .. MORE
Politics and Economics
International Trade
Economic Education
International Macroeconomics
Adam Smith
Foreign Policy
Economic Growth
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
econtalk-podcast
Dwarkesh Patel interviewed the most influential thinkers and leaders in the world of AI and chronicled the history of AI up to now in his book, The Scaling Era. Listen as he talks to EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about the book, the dangers and potential of AI, and the role scale plays in AI progress. The conversation concludes .. MORE
econtalk-podcast
Traditions and norms can seem at best out-of-touch and at worst offensive to many a modern mind. But Israeli computer scientist and Talmud scholar Moshe Koppel argues that traditions and norms–if they evolve slowly–create trust, develop our capacity for deferred gratification, and even, in the case of how we prepare cassava, protect us from poisoning. .. MORE
Economic Growth
Co-blogger Kevin Corcoran has an excellent recent blog post calling for rebranding the “trade deficit” away from its misleading phrasing and toward the more accurate phrasing of “consumption surplus.” My beloved professors Don Boudreaux and Dan Klein have a similar proposal as well. There is much merit in their arguments. I argue that the situation .. MORE
Foreign Policy
George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin has been carrying on a campaign for years to make May 1 “Victims of Communism Day.” I agree with his goal, and I’m doing my bit here to publicize it. He writes: May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But .. MORE
Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.
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
This 1908 edition is the third reprinting of Clark’s path-breaking, yet widely under-read, 1899 textbook, in which he developed marginal productivity theory and used it to explore the way income is distributed between wages, interest, and rents in a market economy. In this book Clark made the theory of marginal productivity clear enough that we .. MORE
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
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
VIDEO
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
VIDEO
Nobel laureate Ronald H. Coase (1910-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Coase’s articles, “The Problem of Social Cost” and “The Nature of the Firm” are among the most important and most often cited works in the whole of economic literature. Coase recounts how he tried to encourage .. 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.
Economic analysis of advertising dates to the 1930s and 1940s, when critics attacked it as a monopolistic and wasteful practice. Defenders soon emerged who argued that advertising promotes competition and lowers the costs of providing information to consumers and distributing goods. Today, most economists side with the defenders most of the time. Advertising comes in .. MORE
Government intervention in food and fiber commodity markets began long ago. The classic case of farm subsidy through trade barriers is the English Corn Laws, which for centuries regulated the import and export of grain in Great Britain and Ireland. They were repealed in 1846. Modern agricultural subsidy programs in the United States began with .. MORE
The 1978 Airline Deregulation Act partially shifted control over air travel from the political to the market sphere. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), which had previously controlled entry, exit, and the pricing of airline services, as well as intercarrier agreements, mergers, and consumer issues, was phased out under the CAB Sunset Act and expired officially .. MORE
-Arthur Seldon
-Ludwig von Mises Full Quote >>
-Ludwig von Mises Full Quote >>