All Posts Tagged With: "living standards"

Saving 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 | | 2 comments | Continued

Competition 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 | | 0 comments | Continued

Why 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 | | 0 comments | Continued

Race, 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 | | 0 comments | Continued

America Is Headed Toward Plutocracy?

In a New York Times op-ed (June 14, 2002), columnist Paul Krugman lamented the increasing inequality between rich and poor, and expressed concern that this will lead to an erosion of democracy. He needn’t worry himself (more important, he needn’t worry his readers), since his argument depends on misleading arguments about wealth disparities and philosophical [...]

1Oct2002 | | 3 comments | Continued

How’s the Third World Doing?

The Third World is in trouble. Standards of living are plummeting, while the West is getting richer. Nearly everyone seems to believe it. The left wants to believe it as a justification for global socialism. Racists want to believe it because it “proves” the superiority of the white race. The media think it’s a good [...]

1Sep2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Equality and Capitalism

Probably the most common charge against capitalism is that it creates wealth and income inequality. The frequency of this allegation testifies to the fact that it strikes a chord with large numbers of people. It’s so believable. After all, who can deny that Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and bond traders each have vastly more money [...]

1Sep2002 | | 6 comments | Continued

The Great Breakthrough and Its Cause

Reviewed by Robert Lawson Julian Simon’s final work before his untimely death is perhaps his most ambitious undertaking. He wants to explain why at least some parts of humanity, after millennia of virtual stagnation, suddenly began a rapid increase in living standards around the years 1750-1800. Simon labels this phenomenon Sudden Modern Progress (SMP). His [...]

1Jul2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

Do Big Corporations Control America?

Since the mid-eighteenth century the development of market-based societies in America and elsewhere, with constitutional protections of property and freedom, has had startling effects. Well over 90 percent of the improvement in the material living standards of ordinary persons that has occurred in the 6,000 years of recorded human history has occurred in that last [...]

1Mar2002 | | 7 comments | Continued

The Luckiest Generation

W. Michael Cox, senior vice president and chief economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and Richard Alm, a business writer, are co-authors of Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think. Meet the Luckiest Generation. When it comes to the material facts of life, the young men and women [...]

1Mar2001 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Return to a Global Economy

If we want to understand the current advance of global capitalism, it is worth remembering that a liberal international economic order has actually arisen twice, first at the end of the nineteenth century and now at the end of the twentieth.[1] In many ways, the world economy has simply caught up to where it was 100 years ago, prompting prominent economists to question whether the level of international integration is as high now as it was before the interruptions of two world wars and the Great Depression.

1Nov2000 | | 0 comments | Continued

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Karol and I named our son Thomas Macaulay Boudreaux in honor of some truly inspiring classical liberals. Two of these are our dear friends Hugh and Pinky Macaulay. Hugh taught economics at Clemson University from the late 1940s until 1983 and was instrumental in shaping that school’s economics department into one of the finest in [...]

1Oct2000 | | 3 comments | Continued

In Praise of Athletes’ High Salaries

While teaching in public schools many years ago, I found that almost all teachers believed they were underpaid and underappreciated. Things probably have not changed. My colleagues expressed their sentiments by hanging a newspaper editorial on a bulletin board in the teachers’ lounge that condemned the high salaries of professional athletes. “Americans do not value [...]

1Aug2000 | | 32 comments | Continued

Development as Freedom

Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics, has been called a “student of the world’s miserable.” Sen’s research has concentrated on the economic problems that affect the world’s poorest citizens: chronic hunger, famine, illiteracy, infant mortality, and disease. For the past 35 years, he has devoted his considerable scholarly talent to [...]

1May2000 | | 2 comments | Continued

Material Progress Over the Past Millennium

E. Calvin Beisner is associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Georgia, and the author of Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity and several other books applying Christian theology and ethics to political economy. An earlier version of this article appeared in World magazine. Reginald [...]

1Nov1999 | | 0 comments | Continued

New Possibilities for Our Grandchildren

Today’s economists don’t appear to be as optimistic as Keynes, even as we enter another year of a dynamic, full-employment economy. I asked several well-known economists for recommendations that would give us sustained (long-term, not short-term) economic growth rates of 6, 7, or maybe even 10 percent a year, eventually fulfilling Keynes’s economic nirvana.

1Jun1999 | | 3 comments | Continued

Bogus Freedom

“Freedom from want” is one of the most frequently invoked notions of freedom in our time. However, it is a bogus freedom that politicians and socialists offer to lull people into accepting policies that destroy true freedom. Freedom from want has been most loudly advocated in this century by those who favored removing almost all [...]

1May1999 | | 0 comments | Continued
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