All Posts Tagged With: "living standards"
Going to Graceland
A recent trip to Memphis took me to Elvis Presley’s famed home, Graceland. Touring Presley’s mansion and its grounds is fascinating for fans of his music, and the Presley estate has done a marvelous job in capturing his music and life. But visiting Graceland mostly interested me as an economist. Walking through the home of [...]
4Jan2012 | Andrew P. Morriss | 9 comments | ContinuedPopulation Control Nonsense
According to an American Dream article, “Al Gore, Agenda 21 and Population Control,” there are too many of us and it has a negative impact on the earth. Here’s what the United Nations Population Fund said in its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate”: [...]
30Nov2011 | Walter E. Williams | 10 comments | ContinuedUnemployment: What’s To Be Done?
In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them. There [...]
30Nov2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Importance of Failure
In today’s society failure has become something to fear, avoid, and therefore prevent at all costs. Whether it is unemployment compensation, farm subsidies, or bailouts for failing companies, the world seems to view failure as having no redeeming social value. If success is all good and failure is all bad, then it seems as though [...]
26Oct2011 | and Steven Horwitz | 11 comments | ContinuedThe Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
The eminent UCLA historian Joyce Appleby concludes The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by referring to the persistent nostalgia for socialism: “As one sufferer from Yugonostalgia explained it, ‘in Yugoslavia people had fun. It was a system for lazy people; if you were good or bad, you still got paid. Now, everything is about [...]
26Oct2011 | Leonard P. Liggio | 2 comments | ContinuedEugenics: Progressivism’s Ultimate Social Engineering
According to the received account of the Progressive Era, an enlightened government swept in and regulated markets for goods, labor, and capital, thereby protecting the hapless masses from the vicissitudes of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. The Progressives had faith that experts would rise above self-interest and implement wise plans to create a great society. The resulting [...]
21Sep2011 | and Art Carden | 21 comments | ContinuedMust a Formal Legal System Come Before Prosperity?
Capital Letters It was disheartening to read John Stossel’s uncritical endorsement of Hernando de Soto’s diagnosis of the causes of poverty in Third World nations as their lack of street addresses and legal titles to property (“Why Do the Poor Stay Poor?,” March 2011). The error of these claims in De Soto’s The Mystery of [...]
25May2011 | Foundation for Economic Education | 0 comments | ContinuedMore Border-Picture Economics
I suggested in the May issue that an aerial photograph of the border between barren Haiti and the heavily forested Dominican Republic was a predictor of the recent Haitian earthquake devastation. Not the earthquake, mind you, but the devastation that followed. The property-rights vacuum that encouraged Haitians to cut trees down without replanting also motivated [...]
29Jun2010 | T. Norman Van Cott | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat a World We Live In
In the long run private property, markets, sound money, and the rule of law make all of us fabulously richer.
24Jun2010 | Steven Horwitz | 5 comments | ContinuedConsumption Must Be Curtailed to Sustain the Human Race?
Jared Diamond, in a January 2 op-ed in the New York Times, argues for a political solution to what he sees as a looming “consumption crisis” facing humanity. He notes that the current consumption of many resources, such as oil and metals, is roughly 32 times higher in the developed than in the developing world [...]
1Apr2008 | Gene Callahan | 1 comment | ContinuedNo Jobs for Young People?
In “The Young and the Jobless,” New York Times columnist Bob Herbert recently wrote that “American workers, especially younger workers, remain stuck in a gloomy employment landscape. . . . The simple truth is that there are not nearly enough jobs available for the many millions of out-of-work or under-worked men and women who need [...]
1Sep2005 | Alan Reynolds | 0 comments | ContinuedWhere in the World Can You Find Economic Freedom?
Late 2003 saw the release of the most recent editions of two publications that rank the nations of the world according to their degrees of economic freedom. The Fraser Institute, located in British Columbia, put out the eighth edition of its Economic Freedom of the World and the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal published [...]
1Sep2004 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Fallacies of Distributism
Thomas Woods holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and is assistant professor of history at Suffolk Community College (SUNY) in Brentwood, New York. In certain disaffected pockets of the political left and right, more and more voices can be heard on behalf of an economic and social system known as distributism. According to [...]
1Nov2003 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 2 comments | ContinuedSaving Hunky Town
Arthur Foulkes is a freelance writer living in Indiana. It’s called “Hunky Town”—a small area of our city known for its large Hungarian population in the early 1900s. Now it’s just another poor neighborhood. “I sometimes forget parts of town like this exist,” my wife said as we watched the shabby homes, broken fences, and [...]
1Oct2003 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 1 comment | ContinuedCompetition Is Cooperation
Much animosity toward capitalism among academic critics can be accounted for by a distaste for competition. The critics just don’t like it. It seems so rough, so uncaring, so vulgar, and laboring under the misapprehension that its opposite is cooperation, they endorse the latter in righteous tones while condemning competition as the “law of the [...]
1Jun2003 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Wages Used to Be So Low
Thomas Woods holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and is assistant professor of history at Suffolk Community College, a unit of the State University of New York. A widespread misconception about the market economy is that it was responsible for low wage rates from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution through the early [...]
1Jun2003 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedRace, Inequality, and the Market
Not long ago I found myself in a debate with colleagues about the economic status of black Americans vis-à-vis whites. Naturally, their presumption was against the free market. The logic, such as it was, ran as follows: (1) we live under a market system (more or less); (2) in a variety of areas blacks have [...]
1Oct2002 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 0 comments | Continued-
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