Archive for E. Frank Stephenson
Frank Stephenson chairs the department of economics at Berry College in Rome, Ga. He blogs at divisionoflabour.com.
The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity
The primary characters in The Price of Everything are Ruth Lieber, an economics professor and provost at Stanford University, and Ramon Fernandez, a Cuban immigrant tennis prodigy studying there. Ramon is saturated with hostility toward the market process, while Ruth has a strong appreciation of markets and liberty. Their conversations—serves and volleys of economic ideas—form [...]
2Apr2009 | E. Frank Stephenson | 0 comments | ContinuedT. Boone Pickens is Right About Oil Imports? It Just Ain’t So!
The $700 billion that Americans spend annually to purchase oil from other countries (according to Pickens) is a price not a transfer. For the $700 billion we send to oil exporters, we get something in return—oil. Our receipt of millions of barrels of oil in exchange for that money is hardly a transfer. We receive a versatile commodity that can be used for everything from making plastics to fueling family vacations. The exporters receive the $700 billion that they can then use to purchase other goods and services.
1Apr2009 | E. Frank Stephenson | 3 comments | ContinuedDry-Cleaning Economics in One Lesson
Another day, another news story about economic wackiness. Gas prices rise, the dollar sinks, and stores are limiting rice sales. What could be next? Clothes hangers.
Yes, clothes hangers. Marie Sledge, co-owner of Rome (Georgia) Cleaners, states, “Hangers last year at this time were $28 a box, where now they are $56.” News reports indicate that [...]
Reducing Class Sizes: Other Things Are Not Always Equal
“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at
the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy;
it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely
for one group but for all groups.” —Henry Hazlitt
Frank Stephenson is an assistant professor of economics at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. [...]
1Jan2002 | E. Frank Stephenson | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review ~ Workin on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History by Walter Mosley
Ballantine Books • 2000 • 118 pages • $16.95
Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins mysteries, departs from the detective genre to offer us Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking off the Dead Hand of History. This economic diatribe is part of Ballantine’s misnamed “Library of Contemporary Thought,” for there is nothing contemporary [...]
Of Lights and Liberty
Frank Stephenson is assistant professor of economics at Berry College and an adjunct scholar with the Georgia Public Policy Foundation.
Recently, while returning from lunch with a colleague, we observed a person blatantly running a red light. This event prompted my colleague to remark that he couldn’t understand why the government had not installed cameras to [...]
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
