Featured Articles

Book Review, Kling's Corner

Drop Your Intellectual Defenses

So if our instincts undervalue truth, that’s not surprising—our instincts evolved in a different world, one better suited to the soldier. Increasingly, our world is becoming one that rewards the ability to see clearly, especially in the long run; a world in which your happiness isn’t nearly as dependent on your ability to accommodate yourself .. MORE

An Economist Looks at Europe

The Bother with Brexit

Brexit is turning out to be a much more complicated affair than both the “remainers” and the “leavers” initially surmised. The hope of an amicable divorce is vanishing. The British Government and the European Commission are edging nearer the precipice of an unwanted and unplanned total break, which neither side really wants, though in the .. MORE

An Economist Looks at Europe

Keynes as Lucifer

If thou beest he; but O how fallen! How changed From him, who in the happy realm of light Clothed with transcendent brightness didst outshine Myriads though bright. —John Milton: Paradise Lost Few economists in history have attracted such a large following as John Maynard Keynes. Not only did he fascinate two generations in the .. MORE

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Economics and Culture

The Economics of Rage Bait

By Kevin Corcoran

Adam Smith

The Law and Economics: Against Siloing

By Jon Murphy

Economic Methods

Just a Coincidence?

By Scott Sumner

Economic Methods

Identities and Causation

By Kevin Corcoran

Central Planning

British Industrial Policy: This Time Is Different

By Pierre Lemieux

Microeconomics

An Econ 101 Error

By Jon Murphy

Book Review

Losing Affection for GDP

By Arnold Kling

Article

Roger Scruton’s Conservatism and Adam Smith

By Alejandra Salinas

Economic Growth

My Weekly Reading and Viewing for July 6, 2025

By David Henderson

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

What Is Capitalism? (with Mike Munger)

What is capitalism, really? Drawing on Adam Smith, Douglass North, and his own experience as a teacher and economist, economist Michael Munger of Duke University discusses three stages of economic development with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts: voluntary exchange, markets, and capitalism. Along the way, the conversation explores the moral and institutional foundations that make impersonal exchange possible, .. MORE

econtalk-podcast

Luca Dellanna on Risk, Ruin, and Ergodicity

Author and consultant Luca Dellanna talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the importance of avoiding ruin when facing risk. Along the way Dellanna makes understandable the arcane concept of ergodicity and shows the importance of avoiding ruin in every day life.

EconLog

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Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Bryan Caplan on Antitrust

I’ve started reading Bryan Caplan’s excellent new book entitled Pro-Market and Pro-Business: Essays on Laissez-faire, and have covered the first 12 (short) chapters.  I had hoped to find lots of things to post about, but unfortunately I tend to agree with almost all of Bryan’s arguments.  There is one chapter on antitrust, however, which I .. MORE

Central Planning

British Industrial Policy: This Time Is Different

In the Summer issue of Regulation, I suggest that the growing popularity of industrial policy (also called “industrial strategy”) all over the world is a return to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Finance Minister of Louis XIV in the 17th century. Industrial policy is not just an assemblage of political meddling acts—otherwise it would be everywhere in .. MORE

LIBERTY CLASSICS SERIES

Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.

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Book Titles

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The Common Sense of Political Economy

By Philip H. Wicksteed

Philip H. Wicksteed (1844-1927) wrote the The Common Sense of Political Economy, Including a Study of the Human Basis of Economic Law (Macmillan and Co., Limited, St. Martin’s Street, London) in 1910.The edition presented here is the first edition, which was widely used as an economics textbook in classrooms in the United Kingdom and the .. MORE

Liberty and Liberalism

By Bruce Smith

Biographical Remarks on Arthur Bruce Smith (1851-1937) by David M. HartBruce Smith was an Australian Barrister (a lawyer who is qualified to argue before a judge) and a Member of the Parliament of New South Wales when it was still a self-governing colony before it became one of the states in the federal Commonwealth of .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

Is State Education Justified? An Appreciation of E.G. West’s Education and the State

By Kevin Currie-Knight

A Liberty Classic Book Review of Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy, by E.G. West.1 As a society, we have become used to government involvement in education. We rarely subject such involvement to economic scrutiny or ask the historical question of whether its appearance was necessary. E.G. West’s book Education and the .. MORE

Maybe It’s Not Time for Socialism

By Donald J. Boudreaux

A Book Review of Time For Socialism, by Thomas Piketty.1 Time For Socialism author Thomas Piketty boasts a doctorate in economics, publishes papers regularly in top economics journals, teaches economics at the Paris School of Economics, and was once on the economics faculty at M.I.T. Yet not only are the 333 pages of his 2021 .. MORE

Conversations

VIDEO

A Conversation with Harold Demsetz

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

VIDEO

A Conversation with James M. Buchanan, Parts I and II

Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Universally respected as one of the founders of the economics of public choice, he is the author of numerous books and hundreds of articles in the areas of public finance, public choice, constitutional economics, and economic .. MORE

Econlib Videos

Intellectual Portrait Series

Conversations with some of the most original thinkers of our time

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Guides

College Economics Topics

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

Economist Biographies

From the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Corporations and Financial Markets , Economic Regulation

Corporate Income Taxation

Introduction No area of tax policy has changed more over the past four decades than corporate income taxation. Since 1980, corporate tax rates have fallen as countries have vied for business investment in an increasingly global economy. More recently, however, lower corporate tax rates have triggered concerns about a “race to the bottom” and, in .. MORE

Labor

Wages and Working Conditions

CEOs of multinational corporations, exotic dancers, and children with lemonade stands have at least one thing in common. They all expect a return for their effort. Most workers get that return in a subtle and ever-changing combination of money wages and working conditions. This article describes how they changed for the typical U.S. worker during .. MORE

Basic Concepts, Economic Systems, The Marketplace

Free Market

“ Free market” is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society. Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services. Thus, when I buy .. 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

The competitive process depends entirely on the freedom of those with better ideas or with greater willingness to serve the market better opportunities. Every arbitrary impediment to entry is a restriction on the competitiveness of the market process.

-Israel Kirzner Full Quote >>

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

-Adam Smith Full Quote >>