Economist Knut Wicksell made his name among the Swedish public with a series of provocative lectures on the causes of prostitution, drunkenness, poverty, and overpopulation. A malthusian, the young Wicksell advocated birth control as the cure for these social ills. His image as a radical social reformer did much to attract the attention of the […]| 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
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
