The Struggle to Get Education Away from the State
Education reform is a perennial hot-button issue, with teachers’ unions like the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association spending vast sums to elect their preferred candidates and lobby them for reforms they find favorabl …
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The Wonderful Surprises of Comparative Advantage
Human society is permeated with comparative advantage. When each person specializes in performing that task, or small set of tasks, for which he or she has a comparative advantage — and then exchanges the fruits of this labor for goods and services pro …
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Economics Is the Great Reality Check
Economics is a ubiquitous and conspicuous set of limits that cause everyone to buck up, cease our simpleton solipsism, face what’s true, become disciplined, get adaptable outside our embedded identity, live within our means, adopt solid values, and lead a good life.
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Krugman’s Zombie Idea: We Owe It to Ourselves
Paul Krugman claims that the national debt doesn’t matter because “we owe it to ourselves.” This “zombie idea” is dead wrong.
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What Is Comparative Advantage?
An economic entity’s technical ability to produce some particular product is, by itself, irrelevant for determining if that entity should produce that product itself or, instead, acquire that product by first producing something else and then trading that something else for the product.
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How Kids Create Wealth By Trading Halloween Candy
The post-Halloween candy market is a commercial society of traders buying low and selling high, and it’s a microcosm of what happens when market exchange works well.
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Wealth Inequality: It’s Complicated
In the debates over wealth inequality that have followed the publication of The Triumph of Injustice (authored by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman), there have been intense discussions of the methodological choices made in the book. There have been few …
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Planners Gonna Plan, but They Won’t Succeed
To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions.
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How Salesmen Improve Our World
The salesman is the empathetic agent of change that helps us overcome our psychological reticence to part with our property in order to gain something that will genuinely improve our subjective well-being.
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Are Economists Basically Immoral?
Heyne’s message to ethicists and religious leaders is that their pronouncements on economic policy necessarily have to take economic theory and evidence seriously.
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The Solution to Blackouts and Wildfires in California
It is time to liberate electric utility customers and bring innovation back to the once innovative electric utility industry that was pioneered by great inventors and businessmen such as Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse.
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My Busted iPhone Did Not Help the Economy
This thinking — or more accurately, this unthinking — pervades the popular understanding of natural disasters, wars, taxes, stadium subsidies, arts subsidies, and all sorts of other things that amount at best to a mere redirection of resources.
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