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Recently, Tucker Carlson has committed the all-too-common mistake of suggesting that evolution by natural selection is an unproven idea, because evolution is merely a “theory.” As he put it on Joe Rogan’s podcast, “Darwin’s theory’s totally unproven – that’s why it’s still a theory, almost two hundred years later.” This is an elementary misunderstanding of .. MORE
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Macroeconomics
I am currently at a blogging conference in Berkeley. Meeting people here has pushed me to think about how I would summarize my blogging. One approach would be to list a bunch of unconventional claims that I have made in various posts over the past 15 years: 1. The Great Recession is usually linked to .. MORE
Labor Mobility, Immigration, Outsourcing
Here are some highlights of my reading for this week. President Donald Trump’s Manhattan Convictions are Unconstitutional by Steven Calabresi, Reason, June 1, 2024. Excerpt: President Donald Trump was convicted yesterday of allegedly altering business records to conceal his alleged payment of money to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, in order to influence the .. MORE
Fiscal Policy
David Leonhardt has a NYT piece on the “new centrism”, which he calls neopopulism. Politicians in both parties increasingly embrace ideas like protectionism and subsidies for manufacturing. These policies are supposedly necessary because neoliberalism has failed: The new centrism is a response to these developments. It is a recognition that neoliberalism failed to deliver. The .. MORE
Cost-benefit Analysis
There are numerous stereotypes about economists. Two are common. The first is that all we think about and study is money. The second is that economists are more selfish than the average person. Both stereotypes are wrong. My wife, who is not herself an economist but has been married to one for almost forty-one years, .. MORE
Free Markets
Less is more — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Less is a bore — Robert Venturi In a recent post, Alex Tabarrok discussed the problem of modern architecture. Why do architects no longer produce the sort of beautiful old buildings that we see in many European cities? Alex cites an article by Samuel Hughes, which .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
There are a wide range of arguments for what makes a state legitimate, or what confers authority on a state in such a way as to create a duty to obey. There is one class of argument I’ve always found unsatisfying, and recently while pondering it I realized why it always seemed to fall short .. MORE
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Browse our archive of posts by author last nameLabor Mobility, Immigration, Outsourcing
Here are some highlights of my reading for this week. President Donald Trump’s Manhattan Convictions are Unconstitutional by Steven Calabresi, Reason, June 1, 2024. Excerpt: President Donald Trump was convicted yesterday of allegedly altering business records to conceal his alleged payment of money to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, in order to influence the .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
I once posted that I found John Rawls’ argument that it’s unjust to benefit from your natural abilities to be inferior to ideas found in J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings: More than anything, this kind of attitude reminds me of what Boromir says to Frodo when attempting to take the Ring .. MORE
Cost-benefit Analysis
There are numerous stereotypes about economists. Two are common. The first is that all we think about and study is money. The second is that economists are more selfish than the average person. Both stereotypes are wrong. My wife, who is not herself an economist but has been married to one for almost forty-one years, .. MORE
… 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 obsolesced by digital media. —Andrey Mir, Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s .. MORE
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Economic Sophisms, by Frédéric Bastiat.1 “The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.” —Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (1845). No one defends the cause of free trade against protectionism, individual freedom over central planning, and opportunity contra .. MORE
James Buchanan This is Part I of a two-part essay: The Past, Present, and Future of Public Choice: Part I The Past, Present, and Future of Public Choice: Part II Sixty years ago, the Public Choice Society was founded by Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan, nearly coincident with the publication of their jointly authored book, .. MORE
A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, edited by Edwin Dolan.1 What’s so Austrian about “Austrian economics?” The label was originally a pejorative, coined by Gustav Schmoller, a harsh critic of Carl Menger’s work. It was an attempt to attach Menger’s ideas to a “provincial” or unsophisticated area. If he .. MORE
The big potential threat from Russia (and China) is nuclear. Last week China's PLA ran a blockade & invasion of Taiwan rehearsal, including mock strikes by sea and air. State media stated the drills..
Jim Glass, May 31