Abba Lerner was the milton friedman of the left. Like Friedman, Lerner was a brilliant expositor of economics who was able to make complex concepts crystal clear. Lerner was also an unusual kind of socialist: he hated government power over people’s lives. Like Friedman, he praised private enterprise on the ground that “alternatives to government […]| Econlib
The fact that trade protection hurts the economy of the country that imposes it is one of the oldest but still most startling insights economics has to offer. The idea dates back to the origin of economic science itself. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which gave birth to economics, already contained the argument for […]| Econlib
For well over a hundred years, the economic world has been engaged in a great intellectual debate. On one side of this debate have been those philosophers and economists who advocate an economic system based on private property and free markets—or what one might call economic freedom. The key ingredients of economic freedom are personal […]| Econlib
The European Union (EU) includes twenty-seven countries and 490 million people. In 2005, the EU had a $13 trillion (€11 trillion) economy, a single market, and for some member countries, a single currency. A growing number of political and economic decisions are made on a pan-European level in Brussels. The origins of the EU are […]| Econlib
More than any other economist, Paul Samuelson raised the level of mathematical analysis in the profession. Until the late 1930s, when Samuelson started his stunning and steady stream of articles, economics was typically understood in terms of verbal explanations and diagrammatic models. Samuelson wrote his first published article, “A Note on the Measurement of […]| Econlib
Saving means different things to different people. To some, it means putting money in the bank. To others, it means buying stocks or contributing to a pension plan. But to economists, saving means only one thing—consuming less out of a given amount of resources in the present in order to consume more in the future. […]| Econlib
The world’s population increased by 50 percent between 1900 and 1950 and by 140 percent between 1950 and 2000, and is projected by the United Nations to increase by just under 50 percent between 2000 and 2050. Of the 3.44 billion increase in the number of people between 1950 and 2000, only 8 percent was […]| Econlib
When asked by mathematician Stanislaw Ulam whether he could name an idea in economics that was both universally true and not obvious, economist Paul Samuelson’s example was the principle of comparative advantage. That principle was derived by David Ricardo in his 1817 book, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Ricardo’s result, which still holds up […]| Econlib
Public choice applies the theories and methods of economics to the analysis of political behavior, an area that was once the exclusive province of political scientists and sociologists. Public choice originated as a distinctive field of specialization a half century ago in the works of its founding fathers, Kenneth Arrow, Duncan Black, James Buchanan, Gordon […]| Econlib