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Some people on the right worry that immigration will cause America’s white population to be largely replaced by non-whites. This hypothesis is sometimes referred to as “The Great Replacement”. There is a great replacement occurring, but these worriers have things exactly backwards. (As an aside, this post will not examine the pros and cons of .. MORE
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Labor Market
Recently, Tucker Carlson has committed the all-too-common mistake of suggesting that evolution by natural selection is an unproven idea, because evolution is merely a “theory.” As he put it on Joe Rogan’s podcast, “Darwin’s theory’s totally unproven – that’s why it’s still a theory, almost two hundred years later.” This is an elementary misunderstanding of .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
In her book The New Jim Crow (Alexander, 2010 ), Michelle Alexander makes the claim that while overt discrimination based on race is no longer socially acceptable, discrimination against those convicted of a crime is. She notes that while crime rates in America are roughly equal with those of other Western nations, incarceration rates have .. MORE
Economic Growth
In my latest OLLI talk, “Economic Growth: Crucial but Uncertain,” which I posted and talked about on Substack, I didn’t discuss one question that one of the participants asked. I didn’t think to do so because John, the A/V guy, made certain cuts and, for some reason, that question and my answer aren’t on .. MORE
Business Economics
In my view, the best writer on economics today is Tom Hazlett. He has a way with words. And good writing necessarily requires good thinking. Tom recently had a recent post on the TikTok ban that was so good that I didn’t want to post it as one of many in Sunday my weekly reading .. MORE
Finance
The consensus view is that the Great Recession of 2008-09 was caused by financial instability. I believe that view is wrong, and wrote an entire book arguing that it was tight money that caused the Great Recession. A recent Bloomberg article perfectly illustrates why it’s important to understand what went wrong in 2008: The FSOC .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
A strange story echoed in Newsweek suggests that many people have not reflected on how democratic politics works, or perhaps they confuse politics as they wish it should be with what it actually is. The magazine writes (“Donald Trump Threatened With New Investigation,” May 11, 2024): Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, has threatened .. MORE
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Browse our archive of posts by author last nameEnergy, Environment, Resources
Brickbat: Robot’s Day of Rest by Charles Oliver, Reason, May 10, 2024. Excerpt: A German court has ruled that the robots at the Tegut supermarket chain must be given Sundays off, just like human workers. Under German law, retail stores must close on Sundays and Christian holidays in order to give employees a day of rest. Tegut .. MORE
Adam Smith
Click-a-ty-clack, click-a-ty-clack . . ., click-a-ty-clack. Those were the sounds that regularly echoed down the second-floor hallway of Clemson University’s Sirrine Hall in the 1980s and before. Those sounds of metal-on-metal could be expected by the economists on the floor at 10:00 in the morning, carrying a clear message: “Time for coffee!” The sounds .. MORE
Austrian Economics
As with any tale, it is useful to begin at the beginning. And in my instance, all my beginnings related to Austrian economics are found at Grove City College. How I ended up at Grove City is an extremely unlikely journey with zigs and zags, the probability of which defies all calculation. I was not .. MORE
… digital media not only enhance information exchange and render offline life obsolete—they also reverse literacy and retrieve orality. … This book is about orality, which once was obsolesced by writing, and about literacy, which is now becoming obsolesced by digital media. —Andrey Mir, Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s .. MORE
“A camping trip is, in fact, the opposite of an economic setting. The camping-trip setting is one of high endowment, low improvement.” I believe there is a basic misrepresentation pervading economics, starting with introductory textbooks and permeating even the most advanced topics in microeconomics and macroeconomics. Economic education gets off on the wrong foot by .. MORE
It was Don Lavoie, not Friedrich Hayek, who coined the term “knowledge problem” in his seminal 1985 National Economic Planning: What Is Left?1 (itself a more accessible and policy-focused distillation of Lavoie’s thesis, under Israel Kirzner, entitled Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered). Lavoie reformulated and clarified the knowledge problem as developed .. MORE
A Book Review of The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind, by Jan Lucassen.1 As the subtitle suggests, Jan Lucassen’s massive work of scholarship is ambitious in scope and scale. The entire sweep of human history and the whole of the planet are its canvas and the story it tells and the analysis .. MORE
How did economists get such a big experiment wrong? Some were simply too optimistic about economies of scale relative to the agency problem. Even in a "market economy" with significant economies of scale, a potential..
Knut P. Heen, May 21