By Arnold Kling
Our new model incorporates several innovative features: For example, rather than using a representative household, it features a demographically accurate synthetic population with millions of households (matching age, education, race, and consumption habits). ...
By Jeremy Horpedahl
A Book Review of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt.1 When an academic writes a book for a popular audience, one of their main goals is to have an impact on the world. Jo...
By Erik W. Matson
In 1776, the British MP Soame Jenyns wrote a work titled A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion.1 The bulk of the work is an apologetic for Christian orthodoxy against the claims of skeptical deism, but it has a notable political dimension. The politi...
By Maria Pia Paganelli
A Book Review of Pricing the Priceless: A History of Environmental Economics, by H. Spencer Banzhaf.1 How do you price scarce and valuable resources that are not traded in a market? Before answering that question, one may need to ask: why do we want to pr...
By Aeon Skoble
Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia was released in 1974, shortly after (and partly in response to) his Harvard colleague John Rawls' 1971 A Theory of Justice. Anarchy, State, and Utopia included a theory of rights and a right-based account of liberalism in the c...
By Alexander William Salter
A Liberty Classics Book Review of Universal Economics, by Armen Alchian and William Allen.1 What do you do when economists stop believing in economics? The "dismal science" never merited its dreary epithet, but trends in economics education at the graduate an...
By Arnold Kling
This book is about how the world's religions have gained such power, what they do with it, and how abuses of this power can be constrained. —Paul Seabright, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People,1 p. 6 Paul Seabright's T...
By Richard Gunderman
Thomas Stearns Eliot. Photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1934. Although the most illustrious honors in economics, such as the Nobel Prize, are typically awarded to specialists in the field, many of the most penetrating economic insights do not come from economists. To l...
By Vlad Tarko
Elinor Ostrom Introduction The commons are the typical example in which self-interested individual actions do not aggregate into beneficial collective outcomes, as judged by members of the community themselves. They are the main counter-example to Adam Smith's log...
By John Estill
While much has been written about entrepreneurship in business and economics publications, much less has been written about entrepreneurial failure. Some writers in the popular press have interesting things to say, such as Megan McArdle's The Up Side of Down: Why Failin...
By Paul Forrester
Henry George A Liberty Classics Book Review of Progress and Poverty, by Henry George.1 Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) was among the most important and widely read books published in the 19th century, but George's work and the single tax movemen...
By Art Carden
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour by Helmut Schoeck.1 I've been such a fool, Vassili. Man will always be man. There is no new man. We tried so hard to create a society that is equal, where there'd be nothing to ...
By Ryan Yonk and Ethan Yang
The contrast often presented between America and China is one where Beijing is a highly competent, well-oiled autocracy while the United States is a political circus held back by partisan drama. On the surface, and especially with recent news headlines, this may seem tr...
By Richard B. McKenzie
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 require...
By Rosolino Candela
A Liberty Classics Book Review of Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason: Text and Documents, by F.A. Hayek (edited by Bruce Caldwell). 1 According to F.A. Hayek, what are the theoretical and historical reasons for the tragedies of socialism that emerged ...
By Arnold Kling
... digital media not only enhance information exchange and render offline life obsolete—they also reverse literacy and retrieve orality. ... This book is about orality, which once was obsolesced by writing, and about literacy, which is now becoming obsoles...