David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche - Live at 92NY (Ep.252) | Conversations with Tyler
Why the most rejected generation is also the most productive—and what that means for America's future.| conversationswithtyler.com
Why the most rejected generation is also the most productive—and what that means for America's future.| conversationswithtyler.com
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
Robert Lucas was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in economics “for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy.” More than any other person in the period from 1970 to 2000, Robert Lucas revolutionized macroeconomic theory. His work led directly […]| Econlib
Keynesian economics is a theory of total spending in the economy (called aggregate demand) and its effects on output and inflation. Although the term has been used (and abused) to describe many things over the years, six principal tenets seem central to Keynesianism. The first three describe how the economy works. 1. A Keynesian believes […]| 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
Ronald Coase received the Nobel Prize in 1991 “for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy.” Coase is an unusual economist for the twentieth century, and a highly unusual Nobel Prize winner. First, his writings are sparse. In a […]| 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
Paul Volcker, while chairman of the Board of Governors of the federal reserve system (1979–1987), was often called the second most powerful person in the United States. Volcker and company triggered the “double-dip” recessions of 1980 and 1981–1982, vanquishing the double-digit inflation of 1979–1980 and bringing the unemployment rate into double digits for the first […]| Econlib
Economists use the term “inflation” to denote an ongoing rise in the general level of prices quoted in units of money. The magnitude of inflation—the inflation rate—is usually reported as the annualized percentage growth of some broad index of money prices. With U.S. dollar prices rising, a one-dollar bill buys less each year. Inflation thus […]| Econlib
When you buy a good or service, you rarely have perfect knowledge of its quality and safety. You are justifiably concerned about getting “ripped off.” Thus the need for consumer protection. Economic activity flourishes when consumers can trust producers, but the consumer must have grounds for trust. Consumers value, then, not only quality and safety, […]| Econlib
Few economic indicators are of more concern to Americans than unemployment statistics. Reports that unemployment rates are dropping make us happy; reports to the contrary make us anxious. But just what do unemployment figures tell us? Are they reliable measures? What influences joblessness? How Is Unemployment Defined and Measured? Each month, the federal government’s Bureau […]| Econlib
A worldwide depression struck countries with market economies at the end of the 1920s. Although the Great Depression was relatively mild in some countries, it was severe in others, particularly in the United States, where, at its nadir in 1933, 25 percent of all workers and 37 percent of all nonfarm workers were completely out […]| 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
New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act—also known as rent control—as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the 2003 war in Iraq, however, or the Vietnam War; it is World War II. That is when rent control started in […]| Econlib
There are many different measures of environmental quality, and most of those in use show that environmental quality is improving. For example, from 1970 to 2000, concentrations of carbon monoxide, a pollutant, fell by 75 percent in the United States and by 95 percent in the United Kingdom. From 1975 to 2000, nitrogen oxides declined […]| Econlib
George Stigler was the quintessential empirical economist. Paging through his classic microeconomics text The Theory of Price, one is struck by how many principles of economics are illustrated with real data rather than hypothetical examples. Stigler deserves a great deal of the credit for getting economists to look at data and evidence. Stigler’s two longest-held […]| 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
