W. S. Jevons (1865) on the Limits to Renewables
“William Stanley Jevons was the first intellectual to question the ability of renewables to serve as primary energies for industrial society. The deep, thorough insight of the father of energy economics remains relevant today.” ~ Robert L. Bradley Jr.
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Economic Impromptus from the Ordinary Business of Life: A Trip to the Park
“As I never tire of telling my students–though they probably tire of hearing it–economics is everywhere. The cool thing is you don’t even need to know where to look.” ~ Art Carden
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Gordon Tullock: A Birthday Appreciation
“Long after many influential economists have been relegated to footnotes or forgotten, I believe people will still be reading and citing Tullock’s work, and not as historical curiosities, either. They will be reading and citing the work of a scholar who made timeless contributions to how we understand the world.” ~ Art Carden
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Julian Simon: Important Enough to Name Your Kids After
“Simon was a model mind and an outstanding intellectual citizen. He thought through the theory and formulated his hypotheses very carefully. He tested his hypotheses against the data. Importantly, he took real and consequential action based on his beliefs–at great risk to his own reputation, but to the everlasting benefit of the rest of us.” ~ Art Carden
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Did Market Failures Require A Lockdown Response?
“Economists and policymakers must ask the question: what are people actually doing in the status quo to manage the harm? We may find that what, on its face, appears to be a failure is actually preferable to the reasonable and feasible alternatives.” ~ Jon Murphy
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Robert Higgs: A Birthday Appreciation
“Higgs’s virtuosity as an economic historian stems from clear and careful analytical thinking combined with an understanding of what the state is and what the state is not. He is not a romantic about war and the state, to put it lightly, and he has never shied away from calling a government exactly what it is: an organization that gets what it wants by threats and violence.” ~ Art Carden
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Thomas Sowell — Intellectual Maverick at Work
“Watching this documentary on Sowell, I am once more struck on how many fruitful research questions can be raised by pursuing the hypotheses he raises in his works. I also respect the clarity of his voice, and the clarity of his purpose.” ~ Peter J. Boettke
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Carl Menger and the Sesquicentennial Founding of the Austrian School
“Carl Menger remains a towering figure, not only for the development of his variation on the ‘marginalist’ theme, but for originating a still unique and distinct and highly relevant approach to economic and social analysis that still rightly bears the name, the ‘Austrian School.'” ~ Richard M. Ebeling
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Ronald Coase: A Birthday Appreciation
“Like Adam Smith before him, Ronald Coase remains highly cited but still underrated. His ideas on transaction costs, rules, and organizations were influential, but as I wrote when he passed in 2013, ‘a few minutes with the ‘externalities’ section of almost any principles book, or a few seconds watching and listening to TV and radio discussions of environmental policy — suggests that it [“The Problem of Social Cost” specifically] is not influential enough.'” ~ Art Carden
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Why Hayek was Right About Nazis Being Socialists
“I would further ask him to concede that whether he agrees with the ends and goals of other socialists, their use of command and control and their introduction of some form of institutional central planning to pursue their declared ‘social good’ makes their system just as much a ‘socialist’ one as any other that Ronald Granieri might endorse or look more favorably upon. So, whether he likes it or not, the Nazis, too, were socialists, just a different stripe than the ones he feels more comfortable with.” ~ Richard M. Ebeling
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What is to be Done? The Rise of Hygiene Socialism and the Prospects for Liberty
“When one lines up the groups which are now appearing to come together in a ‘united front’ against individual liberty – environmental, monetary, cultural, and hygiene socialism – with talk of the need for a “global reset” one wonders ‘what is to be done?’. This was the title of an important pamphlet Lenin wrote in 1901 which inspired Rothbard to ask the same question in 1977.” ~ David Hart
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You’re Not Underpaid ‒ But LeBron Is
“The value of your work isn’t what you say it is; it’s what others say it is, and more so what they’re willing to part with to get that. Even without the particular NBA rules LeBron couldn’t stand up and say his basketball skills are worth a trillion dollars a year. That’s for others to decide ‒ team owners, managers, and fans ‒ not him.” ~ Joakim Book
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