The final post of a #ReadWithMe series on Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works   If Matt Ridley is right, and “most innovation consists of the non-random retention of variations in design”, shall we really care about innovation? If innovation comes out of a largely random process, how can we control, plan, help it? There is a substantial…

Franklin Zimring’s 2017 book, When Police Kill, starts with an alarming statistic: Roughly 1,000 Americans die each year at the hands of police. Zimring, criminologist and law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, talks about his book with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Zimring argues that better policing practices can reduce the number of citizens killed by the…

Someone on Facebook recently asked people to tell the most important thing they learned from their father. Here’s the one I came up with and it was really 2 things I learned. From an early age, I was told by my father that none of my possessions was as important as my life and so if there were ever a…

A Jule 23 Economist article about how “Generous Unemployment Benefits Are Not Keeping Americans from Work” is not easy to understand.  “[T]here is little evidence,” it claims, “to suggest that the extra $600 a week [from the federal government] is slowing down the labour-market recovery.” One would think that paying more in benefits to non-working workers…

I was on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News Channel Thursday night to discuss my op/ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. I would give highlights but the interview lasts only 4 minutes. We hit the main themes of my WSJ op/ed. One point I was hoping we would get to is my point that I made in the WSJ…

In his 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan, economic historian Robert Higgs argued that in the 20th century, the U.S. federal government grew mainly as a result of three crises: World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. During those crises, the feds raised taxes, introduced more spending programs, and took on more regulatory power. While much of the…

At Grove City College in the 1980s we had required courses which were dubbed “Key Courses” – you had to take survey courses in Religion and Philosophy, Social Science and History, Science, and the Creative Arts.  My Religion and Philosophy course was a year long, and the professor, Professor Reed Davis (now at Seattle Pacific University) — taught us…

Review of First Cow (2020), Dir. Kelly Reichardt, starring John Magaro and Orion Lee   First Cow is a quiet movie. Set mostly in the woods and a small trading post in the Oregon territory, and focusing almost exclusively on two characters, it is also a small movie. There’s no epic sweep here, of story or of scenery. But…