Robuta

THE tremendous expansion of credit during and since the World War to finance military operations as well as post-war reparations, reconstruction, and the...

Tyler Cowen writes about the hospitality sector of the economy, In terms of absolute levels, business is above where it was before the crisis. At first glance,...

He is one of the most interesting economic thinkers out there, and Russ Roberts does a nice job interviewing him. The podcast covers the lack of knowledge that...

In his Geschichte und Kritik der Kapitalzins-Theorieen (1884), which I translated in 1890 under the title of Capital and Interest, Professor Bohm-Bawerk, after...

Jan 6, 2025 - Liberty Classics are reviews of texts published across the Liberty Fund network focused on each title’s enduring legacy and contemporary relevance. Our...

Jun 4, 2025 - Introduction The Council for Economic Education (CEE) has created a set of Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics detailing content recommended for...

Oct 23, 2025 - Why are Super Bowl ads so good for launching certain kinds of new products? Why do we all drive on the same side of the road? And why, despite...

The IMF has a reputation (perhaps undeserved) of always getting the policy mix wrong during crises. They also have a reputation for learning from their...

Apr 23, 2023 - Thank you to everyone who comments at EconLog and EconTalk. We appreciate the time our readers and listeners spend to share ideas and give feedback. EconLog...

This is a book about the political organization of a society of free men. Its methodology, its conceptual apparatus, and its analytics are derived,...

Who Was This Guy? As many long-time members of the American Economics Association (I was one for about 25 years) know, one of the famous economists to whom the...

Jul 9, 2018 - Published Under the Superintendence of the Society for the Improvement of the Working Population in the County of Glamorgan

Aug 7, 2021 - Definitions and Basics Division of Labor, from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics Though the scientific understanding of the importance of division of...

Russ Roberts interviews Pete Boettke on Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School. As you listen, note near the end of a slight dig against the...

In response, Romney put forward a new tax plan in recent days suggesting that he might not raise taxes by eliminating specific deductions that are too popular...

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) first published Socialism in German, in 1922. The edition presented here is that published by Liberty Fund in 1981. It follows the...

Nov 27, 2022 - Introduction Gross Domestic Product–GDP for short–is one of many measures of the total income and output of an economy. Gross National...

Holman Jenkins makes some useful points. nowadays U.S. consumption of Persian Gulf oil totals about $18 billion a year, less than we spend on computer parts...

Jul 2, 2025 - Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand...

Aug 4, 2025 - Book Review of: Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress–and How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman,1; and Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.2...

Scott Sumner says much I agree with about nature, nurture, and behavior. When Ronald Green argues that obesity is caused by genes rather than laziness and lack...

I have an essay that looks at recent writing by Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman. To economists, raising the retirement age is the obvious fix for a system that...

In January of 2001, I wrote, You no longer need to plan and manage large capital expenditures, so you do not need a large bureaucracy. What I expect the...

MIT Technology Review reports, By the end of the decade, manufacturers in the United States could make solar panels that are less than half as expensive as the...

Erin Ade, on RT (previously called Russia Today), which is funded by the Russian government, does another good interview of me. It seems strange. Other than...

I am a utilitarian. Many (most?) utilitarians are progressives. So why am I not a progressive? I recently ran across three news articles that help to explain...

In the U.S., we have low gas taxes, low car taxes, few tolls, strict zoning that leads developers to provide lots of free parking, low speed limits, lots of...

The June issue of Cato Unbound features a lead essay on recycling by Mike Munger and, so far, response essays from Edward Humes, Melissa Walsh Innes, and...

Jan 20, 2020 - Introduction Everyone recognizes that physics is a science. Everyone also recognizes economics–a “social science”– is somehow not quite...

He writes, This couple bought their Reno home in June 1988 for $127,000. Their home is currently valued at $100,000. They currently have a mortgage worth...

Introduction Definitions and Basics Federal Reserve System, from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics The Original Federal Reserve System. Several monetary...

The Fed releases the detailed minutes of its meetings with a 5 year lag. Bloggers that follow monetary policy closely have been eagerly awaiting the 2008...

Sep 28, 2022 - Definitions and Basics Profits, from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics Capitalists earn a return on their efforts by providing three productive inputs....

In July of 2008, the average U.S. price of regular gasoline was $4.062. As usual, global hysteria followed. And as usual, I was unperturbed. So unperturbed, in...

Sep 1, 2025 - Who defines and enforces property rights? If you are the average person, an undergraduate student, or even a mainstream economics professor, that answer is...

Listen to the EconTalk podcast Arnold Kling on the Three Languages of Politics and consider these questions. 1 In his newest book, The Three Languages of...

Each year, America sets aside a week to salute the men and women who do the difficult, dangerous, and often thankless work of safeguarding our communities. Our...

Russ Roberts continues to engage with Tyler Cowen on whether there has been stagnation. A lot of the argument is over what has happened to the median worker....

Dec 16, 2022 - Henry George is best remembered as a proponent of the “single tax” on land. The government should finance all of its projects, he argued, with proceeds...

Matt Mitchell, a sharp young economist at the Mercatus Center, has come up with a 14 second video that shows the rise and fall of economic freedom over the...

Oct 24, 2023 - Introduction Read, Leonard, I, Pencil. Charming illustration of the workings of the invisible hand to guide the market and coordinate the division of labor in...

Nov 24, 2025 - Will Storr talks about his book The Status Game with EconTalk host Russ Roberts, exploring how our deep need for respect and recognition shapes our behavior....

Nov 5, 2025 - Economists like blackboards. Using chalk (or markers), they construct logically consistent abstractions of the world. They call them “models”. This invites...

Thomas Mackay (1849-1912) was a successful English wine merchant who retired early from business so he could devote himself entirely to the study of economic...

Bruce Bartlett surveys recent cost-benefit analysis. In July, economist Martin N. Baily, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton,...

Andrew Ross tells us what the big boys were doing during the crisis. Neil Barofsky says that the government was playing a confidence game. The fact that there...

People frequently claim that their political opponents have hidden agendas. When liberals push for expansionary fiscal policy during recessions, conservatives...

There are studies that reportedly show that a large share of health care spending comes in the last year of life. For example, this abstract gives a figure of...

IN this book I have endeavored to determine whether protection or free trade better accords with the interests of labor, and to bring to a common conclusion on...

Wildfires destroyed Lahaina. Now Hawaii officials are trying to ward off outsiders from scooping up properties on the cheap in the popular tourist destination....

According to Thomas Saving, an economist who is one of the trustees of Social Security and Medicare, we are already taking money from general revenue to fund...

Few economic indicators are of more concern to Americans than unemployment statistics. Reports that unemployment rates are dropping make us happy; reports to...

Corporate takeovers became a prominent feature of the American business landscape during the seventies and eighties. A hostile takeover usually involves a...

Dec 10, 2019 - “Do people do things for us because those people are good, because they love us? Sometimes they do. Your family loves you, and your friends would...

When the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the health insurance mandate part of Obamacare, John Roberts suggested that the penalty for not buying health insurance...

Three of my former students were in town last week and I had lunch with each of them. Meeting with them and hearing what they had learned in my class was very...

An especially clever argument by Nathan Smith: [G]lobalization has half-Americanized half the world already. 19th-century immigrants may have been racially...

This is a program on Russian television, talking about a proposal to require pre-approval for financial products. The Capitol in the background was...

It may not be necessary to inform readers again that I have aimed in this book to present only the facts bearing on the experiments of the United States with...

Apr 9, 2025 - An Economics Reading List Interest Rates and Uncertainty Bagehot, Walter, Lombard Street Brief reviewBentham, Jeremy, Defence of Usury Brief Review...

Economic conditions are constantly changing, and each generation looks at its own problems in its own way. In England, as well as on the Continent and in...

The three concepts mentioned in the title of the post are completely unrelated to each other. So unrelated that the subjects ought not even be taught in the...

The price of a share of stock, like that of any other financial asset, equals the present value of the sum of the expected dividends or other cash payments to...

A few weeks ago, Robin Hanson posed a lunchtime challenge: What is the difference between Left and Right? The point of the question, of course, is not to...

In the summer of 1982, I was a special assistant to assistant secretary of labor John Cogan. That summer, the U.S. was still in the midst of the 1981-82...

The New York Times reports it. Officials said that after talking to senior lawmakers through the weekend, they expected that Congress would attach the...

From my former student, Michael Williams: What I am wondering, or maybe proposing, is that as communications become easier and require less effort (i.e....

Aug 29, 2025 - We’ve long been told that if there’s one issue economists agree on… it’s free trade. Maybe economists still agree, but protectionism is...

The Washington Post has another in a series that looks at our corrupt agriculture policies. A maverick dairyman named Hein Hettinga started bottling his own...

In his Geschichte und Kritik der Kapitalzins-Theorieen (1884), which I translated in 1890 under the title of Capital and Interest, Professor Bohm-Bawerk, after...

I have bet Daniel Filan $100 at even odds that Gary Johnson will receive less than or equal to 5% of the 2016 U.S. Presidential popular vote. I hope to lose,...

Sep 2, 2025 - Is the United States victimized by trade? What causes trade deficits? Are higher tariffs a good idea? Can manufacturing jobs return to the United States?...

Jun 22, 2018 - “To get the most out of life, to think like an economist, you have to be know what you’re giving up in order to get something else.” One of...

Lawrence Kudlow writes, There are a number of deflationary factors behind my campaign to get the Fed to permanently inject new cash into the banking system and...