More than a century after his death, Karl Marx remains one of the most controversial figures in the Western world. His relentless criticism of capitalism and his corresponding promise of an inevitable, harmonious socialist future inspired a revolution of global proportions. It seemed that—with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the spread of communism throughout […]| Econlib
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk was one of the leading members of the Austrian school of economics—an approach to economic thought founded by Carl Menger and augmented by Knut Wicksell, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Sir John Hicks. Böhm-Bawerk’s work became so well known that before World War I, his Marxist contemporaries regarded the Austrians […]| Econlib
The Austrian school of economics was founded in 1871 with the publication of Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics. menger, along with william stanley jevons and leon walras, developed the marginalist revolution in economic analysis. Menger dedicated Principles of Economics to his German colleague William Roscher, the leading figure in the German historical school, which dominated economic […]| Econlib
Edmund S. Phelps was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in economic science “for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy.” He focused on two distinct areas of macroeconomics: the tradeoff between unemployment and inflation and capital accumulation and economic growth. In the early 1960s, many economists believed that the tradeoff between unemployment and inflation […]| Econlib
Although labor unions have been celebrated in folk songs and stories as fearless champions of the downtrodden working man, this is not how economists see them. Economists who study unions—including some who are avowedly prounion—analyze them as cartels that raise wages above competitive levels by restricting the supply of labor to various firms and industries. […]| 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
Socialism—defined as a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production—was the tragic failure of the twentieth century. Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral defects of capitalism, it has far surpassed capitalism in both economic malfunction and moral cruelty. Yet the idea and the ideal of socialism […]| Econlib
If any twentieth-century economist was a Renaissance man, it was Friedrich Hayek. He made fundamental contributions in political theory, psychology, and economics. In a field in which the relevance of ideas often is eclipsed by expansions on an initial theory, many of his contributions are so remarkable that people still read them more than fifty […]| Econlib
George Akerlof, along with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, received the 2001 Nobel Prize “for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.” Although much of economics is built on the assumption of perfect information, various economists in the past had considered the effects of imperfect information. Two giants in this area were ludwig von […]| Econlib