Topic: Economic Education

Economics Is the Great Reality Check

– November 10, 2019

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.

Economic Education, Economic Theory

Krugman’s Zombie Idea: We Owe It to Ourselves

– November 6, 2019

Paul Krugman claims that the national debt doesn’t matter because “we owe it to ourselves.” This “zombie idea” is dead wrong.

Economic Education

What Is Comparative Advantage?

– November 4, 2019

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.

Economic Education, Economic Growth

How Kids Create Wealth By Trading Halloween Candy

– October 30, 2019

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.

Economic Education, Economic History

Wealth Inequality: It’s Complicated

– October 30, 2019

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 …

Economic Education

Planners Gonna Plan, but They Won’t Succeed

– October 29, 2019

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.

Economic Education, Economic Theory

How Salesmen Improve Our World

– October 27, 2019

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.

Economic Education

Are Economists Basically Immoral?

– October 26, 2019

Heyne’s message to ethicists and religious leaders is that their pronouncements on economic policy necessarily have to take economic theory and evidence seriously.

Economic Education, Free Markets

The Solution to Blackouts and Wildfires in California

– October 23, 2019

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.

Economic Education

My Busted iPhone Did Not Help the Economy

– October 22, 2019

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.

Economic Education

The Three Biggest Myths about Political Economy

– October 21, 2019

Although such myths will never be completely slain, their baneful impacts can be reduced by sound and unrelenting economic education and public commentary.

Economic Education

The Limits to Hostile Takeovers

– October 17, 2019

Capitalism, especially seen as a system conducive to hostile takeovers, does not need saving.