Article
Economics in One Lesson author Henry Hazlitt said that good ideas must be re-learned every generation. As I tell my economic history students, we’re contending for the values of the Enlightenment—life, liberty, equality, and the resulting prosperity. Contrary to what we are often told, we owe our prosperity to liberty, not exploitation, and a flourishing .. MORE
Book Review
A Book Review of The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph E. Stiglitz.1 Introduction Columbia University economics professor Joseph E. Stiglitz has recently published a book titled The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society. In it, Stiglitz, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics with George Akerlof and .. MORE
Book Review
Book Review of Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events.1 by Robert J. Shiller. And if you wish to adorn, borrow the metaphor from something better in the same genus, if to denigrate, from something worse. —Aristotle, Rhetoric III, 1404b It is an odd experience to be reading Robert J. Shiller’s .. MORE
Regulation and Subsidies
Conversation Arts: Civility, Incivility, and Persuasion
Economic History
Adam Smith
Institutional Economics
Macroeconomics
Cryptocurrency
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econtalk-podcast
Tariffs are in the air. Will they help or hurt Americans? Listen as economist Scott Sumner makes the case against tariffs and various other forms of government intervention that go by the name of industrial policy. Along the way he looks at some of the history of worrying about the economic and military dangers posed .. MORE
econtalk-podcast
Would an AI simulation of your dead loved one be a blessing or an abomination? And if you knew that after your own death, your loved ones would create a simulation of you, how would that knowledge change the way you choose to live today? These are some of the questions psychologist Paul Bloom discusses with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts as we stand on the threshold .. MORE
Cryptocurrency
Crypto doesn’t have intrinsic value; neither does paper money and neither does gold. A friend who regularly reads both the Financial Times and my posts on EconLog and on my Substack sent me the following email: I was talking with a friend who is a wealth manager at JP Morgan, and he is advising .. MORE
Monetary Policy
Tyler Cowen recently challenged us to try to stump an AI named “o1”: 1. o1 is a very good economist. Try to stump it if you can. I could not find o1, so I used ChatGPT 4.o mini. I hope someone will try the following question with an o1 and report the results in the .. MORE
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Most political writers have concluded, that a republican government, over a very large territory, cannot exist; and as this opinion is sustained by alarming proofs, and weighty authorities, it is entitled to much respect, and serious consideration. All extensive territories in past times, and all in the present age, except those of the United States, .. MORE
The following pages are presented to the public, in compliance with a requisition of the Statute relative to the Professorship of Political-Economy, that one Lecture at least shall be published every year.Conceiving that one object of that provision must be, that the Public may have some knowledge of what sort of Lectures on the subject .. MORE
Book Review of The Politics of Bad Options: Why the Eurozone’s Problems Have Been Hard to Resolve, by Stefanie Walter, Ari Ray, and Nils Redeker.1 The Euro and the Economic and Monetary Union were introduced to promote trade, deeper economic integration, and higher prosperity within the European Union. Largely this all came true. The Euro .. MORE
[I]nstitutions should be formative… they should act as links between the personal and the social. What we need, then, is a recommitment to such an understanding of institutions. Our challenge is less to calm the forces that are pelting our society than to reinforce the structures that hold us together. That calls for a spirit .. MORE
VIDEO
Gary Becker (1930-2014) was one of the most original and pathbreaking economists of modern times. His 1992 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences was described as his “having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behavior.” Becker’s early work on discrimination led to his further work .. MORE
VIDEO
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
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.
The earth’s natural resources are finite, which means that if we use them continuously, we will eventually exhaust them. This basic observation is undeniable. But another way of looking at the issue is far more relevant to assessing people’s well-being. Our exhaustible and unreproducible natural resources, if measured in terms of their prospective contribution to .. MORE
Some of the most significant tax changes in recent years have concerned the taxation of capital income. In 2003, Congress cut the top tax rate on dividends to 15 percent—significantly greater than the zero dividend tax that President George W. Bush wanted, but far below the 40 percent many high-income individuals paid in 2000. The .. MORE
The U.S. welfare system would be an unlikely model for anyone designing a welfare system from scratch. The dozens of programs that make up the “system” have different (sometimes competing) goals, inconsistent rules, and over-lapping groups of beneficiaries. Responsibility for administering the various programs is spread throughout the executive branch of the federal government and .. MORE
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