The post-Halloween candy market is a commercial society of traders buying low and selling high, and it’s a microcosm of what happens when market exchange works well.
Heyne’s message to ethicists and religious leaders is that their pronouncements on economic policy necessarily have to take economic theory and evidence seriously.
This thinking — or more accurately, this unthinking — pervades the popular understanding of natural disasters, wars, taxes, stadium subsidies, arts subsidies, and all sorts of other things that amount at best to a mere redirection of resources.
If we are serious about helping people escape extreme poverty, it’s time we look into getting people from where their labor has lower value to where their labor has higher value.
If you’ve ever been scuba diving or snorkeling, you probably know that swimmers aren’t supposed to touch the coral with their bare hands.
If the result of all the efforts of all the economists over all of history results in tariffs that are one percentage point lower than they would otherwise be, we will have earned our keep.
You have heard, no doubt, that we are going to run out of oil. Is there any hope? Can we escape the calamity? Whatever might we hapless citizens do? This sounds like a job for … the Speculator!
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is a one-woman university, a polymath’s polymath in an age of ever-increasing academic specialization. She has done ground-breaking work across several fields, and her academic appointments show it.
Price gouging laws are effectively knowledge embargoes that keep people positioned to help from getting the message.
The strangers at Uber cared for my loved ones by making it easier for me to get to and from the studio safely — and markets made it possible for them to do it without explicitly intending to do so.