I’ve written many times about how Americans are much richer than Europeans. And I’ve also written many times that the U.S. economy has been growing faster (which shouldn’t happen according to convergence theory). There’s a simple reason for America’s superior performance. The U.S. is burdened by a medium-sized welfare state and a bad tax system […]
Tweet… is from page 422 of Robert Bork’s masterful 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox: Competition in open markets reflects the ideal of equality of opportunity, while antitrust’s longstanding and growing concern for the small and less efficient reflects a preference for equality of outcome. Outcomes are not equal in open competition, hence the pressure for…
TweetHere’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal: Editor: You report that, in response to Google’s firing of 28 workers who protested that company’s affiliation with the Israeli government, a spokeswoman for the group that organized the protests said about the firings that “this flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values…
TC: Let’s say you were Peter Boettke, and looking to pen a critique of Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship. You come from a slightly different branch of the Austrian school. How would you use that differential background to express your differences with the Kirznerian theory, which emphasizes alertness above all else as an entrepreneurial characteristic? “If […]
Tweet… is from page 434 of the final (2016) volume – Bourgeois Equality – of Deirdre McCloskey’s soaring trilogy on the essence of bourgeois values, on their transmission, and on their essential role in modern life: Zero-sum is the default in thinking about my gain and thine. It is the chief error in economic thinking…
TweetProf. Angus Deaton Princeton University Prof. Deaton: Over the years I’ve learned much from your writings, and I regard your 2013 The Great Escape as one of the most important books published in the past 15 years. So I was quite surprised and disappointed to read that you, as you say, are now “much more…
Argentina’s President Javier Milei had a warning for those attending the annual WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland; ‘the Western world is in danger’ from ‘collectivist experiments’ such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), and has called on the world to reject socialism and instead embrace “free enterprise capitalism” to end global poverty. H/T zerohedge “Today, […]
There are three reasons to be a knee-jerk supporter of tax cuts (or to be a knee-jerk opponent of tax increases). The morality-driven libertarian argument that people should be able to keep the income they earn. The starve-the-beast argument that less revenue at some point may translate into less spending. The economic argument that lower […]
Tweet… is from my emeritus Nobel-laureate colleague Vernon Smith‘s splendid speech “Human Betterment Through Globalization,” delivered in September 2005 at the Irvington-on-Hudson then-headquarters of the Foundation for Economic Education: The challenge is that we all function simultaneously in two overlapping worlds of exchange. First, we live in a world of personal, social exchange based on…
TweetAmong the many bits of unearned good fortune that have come my way in life was to have been a student in two of Fritz Machlup‘s classes at NYU. (In Spring 1981 I was a student in the last graduate course he taught on one of his specialities, International Trade. That course was phenomenally good.…
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode description: Jennifer Burns is a professor history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The […]
Tweet… is from pages 86-87 of Georgetown University philosopher Jason Brennan’s excellent 2014 book, Why Not Capitalism?: So, to summarize, there is a range of reasons to have private property, even in utopian conditions. People get value from having objects that they can use at will, without having to ask permission from others. They get…
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
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