Some Sins of Textbook Economics

People who are ignorant of economics are susceptible to all sorts of misunderstandings. Fortunately knowledge of even just the basics of sound economics is a powerful inoculant against many dangerous falsehoods and half-truths. This fact, however, does not imply that exposure to more economics is necessarily good. The sad reality is that economists too often [...]

Pulling Down the Keynesian Cross

In his third and final volume on John Maynard Keynes, Robert Skidelsky comes to the shocking conclusion that the Keynesian revolution was temporary, that Keynes’s General Theory was really only a “special” case, and that “free market liberalism” has ultimately triumphed. This is all the more amazing given that Lord Skidelsky has spent the past 20 years of his professional career studying Keynes and resides in Keynes’s old estate, Tilton House. Few scholars would have the guts to repudiate the theory of the man they adore.

Flunking Economics

Why should we care about economic literacy? Are we troubled by illiteracy in physics? Or metaphysics? Should we worry that most of us can’t remember much of the periodic chart of the elements? Why should we worry more about economics? Because economic illiteracy is dangerous. I can ride on a roller coaster without understanding centrifugal [...]

Today’s Most Influential Economist?

Fill in the blank. Who is the mysterious economist named above? Most of my colleagues named Milton Friedman, but in Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw’s bestseller, the Chicago economist runs a close second to. . . .

F.A. Hayek, the Austrian economist!

Why Hayek? Because,

Best Textbooks for a Free-Market University

Mark Skousen is an economist at Rollins College, Department of Economics, Winter Park, Florida 32789, a Forbes columnist, and editor of Forecasts & Strategies. He is also the author of Economics on Trial (Irwin, 1993), a review of the top ten textbooks in economics. He is currently working on his own textbook, Economic Logic. “I [...]

The Myth of the Independent Fed

Dr. DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. Ever since its founding in 1913, the Fed has described itself as an independent agency operated by selfless public servants striving to fine-tune the economy through monetary policy. In reality, however, a non-political governmental institution is as likely as a barking cat. Yet, [...]

Another Shocking Reversal in Macroeconomics

Who wrote this? “Fiscal policy is no longer a major tool of stabilization policy in the United States. Over the foreseeable future, stabilization policy will be performed by Federal Reserve monetary policy.”

Milton Friedman? No, it was not a monetarist.

I recently met with Milton Friedman in his home in San Francisco, and asked him who he thought wrote the above statement. “Alan Greenspan?” he queried. No, it wasn’t a Federal Reserve official.