Steve Horwitz’s recent post, “Marginal Revolutionaries: Kirzner and the Modern Austrians,” August 19, 2020, references the bio of Israel Kirzner in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. I finished the bio a couple of months ago and it was posted last month. Steve’s post reminded me that I had forgotten to call attention to it. In researching the bio,…
What are the essential features of the university? What features should survive and what might not in the wake of COVID? In this, our 750th (!) episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes back “the Cy Young of EconTalk guests,” Mike Munger to discuss the future of higher education. Munger believes “top” schools can emerge from the current…
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…
I’ve repeatedly debated with Tyler Cowen about the epistemic value of betting. Long before I amassed my 21-bet winning streak, I’ve argued that betting about substantive intellectual questions does all of the following: 1. Greatly improves the quality of our thinking by converting vague, ambiguous language into clear, specific claims. 2. Greatly improves the quality of…
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 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,…
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…