This is my archive

bar

Economics: Prices, Pri-ces, P.R.I.C.E.S.

It is impossible to understand the economy—that is, the economic consequences of individual actions—without understanding the role that prices play or are prevented from playing. This was a crucial scientific discovery of modern times. For that very reason, microeconomic theory used to be called “price theory.” So it is troubling to observe that many of our contemporaries and even many…

/ Learn More

Franklin Zimring on When Police Kill

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…

/ Learn More

Teaching Responsibility

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…

/ Learn More

Is utilitarianism WEIRD?

I suspect it is, at least in the sense of WEIRD as a now trendy acronym for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. One criticism of utilitarianism is that it implies that we should value the welfare of far away people just as much as we value the welfare of our own family and friends. This, it is argued,…

/ Learn More

Henderson on the Ingraham Angle

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

/ Learn More