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Nature, Nurture, and Identical Twins (with David Bessis)
By Jan 19 2026Featured Articles
Featured Article
The Blurry Line Between Competition and Cooperation
By Timothy Taylor
“Those of us who self-identify as economists should not wear the terminology of ‘competition’ as a badge of shame, while wistfully contemplating a presumed ideal of cooperation.” What is the opposite of “competition”? If you fear that this is a trick question and run off to check a synonym/antonym dictionary, you will find an answer .. MORE
The Struggle Over Intellectual Property
By Declan McCullagh
“What’s the best way to protect digital works—by acts of Congress or with technology?” Speedy Internet links, improved compression techniques, and fatter hard drives have dealt harshly with traditional views of copyright. From the ongoing courtroom wrangling over Napster’s fate to the online swapping of pirated movies, our current copyright structure is being stretched and .. MORE
Featured Article
An Economic Case for Immigration
By Benjamin Powell
“Don’t the laws of supply and demand dictate that wages would fall? Not when other things change at the same time. Those immigrants who increase the supply of labor also demand goods and services, causing the demand for labor to increase.” Arizona’s recent passage of a new immigration law has re-ignited the national immigration debate. .. MORE
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Data and Evidence
Nature, Nurture, and Identical Twins (with David Bessis)
Philosophy and Methodology
The Mattering Instinct (with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)
Conversation Arts: Civility, Incivility, and Persuasion
Conversation, Interintellect, and Arcadia (with Anna Gát)
EconTalk
All >econtalk-podcast
Learning to Think Like Someone Else (with David Marquet)
Former submarine commander David Marquet joins EconTalk’s Russ Roberts to explore how distancing–thinking like someone else, somewhere else, or sometime else–can unlock better choices in business and life. They talk about leadership without giving orders, how to empower teams, and what it means to see yourself as a coach rather than a boss. Along the way, they discuss .. MORE
econtalk-podcast
Can Artificial Intelligence Be Moral? (with Paul Bloom)
It seems obvious that moral artificial intelligence would be better than the alternative. But psychologist Paul Bloom of the University of Toronto thinks moral AI is not just a meaningless goal but a bad one. Listen as Bloom and EconTalk’s Russ Roberts have a wide-ranging conversation about the nature of AI, the nature of morality, .. MORE
EconLog
All >Property Rights
Everyone Take Copies
I have a new working paper with Bart Wilson titled: “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property.” The title of this post, “everyone take copies,” comes from a conversation between the human subjects in an experiment in our lab, on which the paper is based. The experiment was studying how and when .. MORE
Competition
What is Competition?
Economists extol the importance of competition in markets for driving prices down and quality up. But what is “competition” and how does it actually work? To non-economists, the word conjures the idea of something like a sporting contest, where there can be one winner while everyone else loses. But this comparison fails on at least .. MORE
LIBERTY CLASSICS SERIES
Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.
Book Titles
All Books >A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s “Spirit of Laws”
By Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) composed A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws in 1811. It was promptly translated to English by Thomas Jefferson, who published it along with translations of M. Condorcet’s “Observations on the [Twenty-ninth] Book” (the original cover page produced by William Duane’s Philadelphia press erroneously reads as .. MORE
Free Trade and Other Fundamental Doctrines of the Manchester School
By Francis W. Hirst
DURING the last decade it has been the fashion to talk of the Manchester School with pity or contempt as of an almost extinct sect, well adapted, no doubt, for the commercial drudgery of a little, early Victorian England, but utterly unfitted to meet the exigencies or satisfy the demands of a moving Imperialism. Many .. MORE
Book Reviews and Suggested Readings
What Should Economists Do? An Appreciation
By Donald J. Boudreaux
I‘m thankful to my undergraduate mentor, Bill Field, for things too many to count. Among these is his introducing me during my junior year to public-choice scholarship. “Dr. Field” (as I then called him) did so by suggesting that I read James Buchanan’s and Richard Wagner’s 1978 monograph, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs .. MORE
Using Reason to Understand the Abuse and Decline of Reason
By Rosolino Candela
A Liberty Classics Book Review of Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason: Text and Documents, by F.A. Hayek (edited by Bruce Caldwell). 1 According to F.A. Hayek, what are the theoretical and historical reasons for the tragedies of socialism that emerged in the 20th century? Hayek attempted to answer this question in what .. MORE
Conversations
VIDEO
A Conversation with Ronald H. Coase
Nobel laureate Ronald H. Coase (1910-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Coase’s articles, “The Problem of Social Cost” and “The Nature of the Firm” are among the most important and most often cited works in the whole of economic literature. Coase recounts how he tried to encourage .. MORE
VIDEO
A Conversation with James M. Buchanan, Parts I and II
Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Universally respected as one of the founders of the economics of public choice, he is the author of numerous books and hundreds of articles in the areas of public finance, public choice, constitutional economics, and economic .. MORE
Econlib Videos
Intellectual Portrait Series
Conversations with some of the most original thinkers of our time
Guides
Reading Lists by Topic
The Reading Lists by Topic pages contain some suggested readings organized by topic, including materials available on Econlib. Brief reviews or descriptions are included for many items.
College Economics Topics
Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.
High School Economics Topics
These free resources are appropriate for teachers of high school and AP economics, social studies, and history classes. They are also appropriate for interested students, home schoolers, and newcomers to the topic of economics.
From the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
Unintended Consequences
The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it. The concept of unintended consequences is one .. MORE
Competition
Economic competition takes place in markets—meeting grounds of intending suppliers and buyers.1 Typically, a few sellers compete to attract favorable offers from prospective buyers. Similarly, intending buyers compete to obtain good offers from suppliers. When a contract is concluded, the buyer and seller exchange property rights in a good, service, or asset. Everyone interacts voluntarily, .. MORE
Creative Destruction
Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), the Austrian economist wrote: The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the .. MORE
Quotes
The market economy is the product of a long evolutionary process. It is the outcome of man’s endeavors to adjust his action in the best possible way to the given conditions of his environment that he cannot alter.
-Ludwig von Mises
Regard to our own private happiness and interest, too, appear upon many occasions very laudable principles of action.
-Adam Smith Full Quote >>
We are as little able to conceive what civilization will be, or can be, five hundred or even fifty years hence as medieval man, or even our grandparents, were able to foresee our own manner of life.
-F. A. Hayek