All Posts Tagged With: "standard of living"
Talk About a Revolution
What caused the Industrial Revolution? Few questions in economic history are discussed and debated as much as this one. Even if you happen to be among the small number of people who regret what historian (and Freeman columnist) Steve Davies calls “the wealth explosion” of the past couple of centuries, you must nevertheless find this [...]
24Aug2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 5 comments | ContinuedWhy Do Futurists Get So Much Wrong?
The Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann once walked into the colloquium room at New York University, where the blackboard displayed this quotation: “When it comes to the future, one word says it all: You never know. – Y. Berra.” Having built much of his economics on the unknowability of the future, Lachmann noticed the quote. However, [...]
25Aug2010 | Steven Horwitz | 6 comments | ContinuedMad About Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization
Free trade is the consumer’s best friend and a great contributor to peace. Pressing those ideas home is Cato Institute trade expert Daniel Griswold’s challenge in this book. He is mad for trade, while too many others are mad against trade. As an example of the latter, consider radio host and writer Lou Dobbs, who [...]
25Aug2010 | William H. Peterson | 1 comment | ContinuedGlobalization: The Irrational Fear that Someone in China Will Take Your Job
With the Obama administration turning toward trade protectionism, this is a good time to revisit the age-old controversy over free trade. Recent arguments have often centered on the supposed evils of globalization, and Globalization attempts, with only partial success, to deal with globalization anxiety. According to Greenwald (who teaches in Columbia University’s Graduate School of [...]
20Apr2010 | Phil Murray | 0 comments | ContinuedSomalia: Failed State, Economic Success?
By most measures Somalia has improved living standards faster than the average sub-Saharan African country since the government of Siad Barre collapsed in the early 1990s.
1Apr2009 | Benjamin Powell | 42 comments | ContinuedInterpreting the State of the World
Why are optimists about the state of the world disproportionately represented by classical liberals, libertarians, and free- market conservatives, while pessimists about the state of the world are disproportionately represented by statists? Why do left-leaning media such as the New York Times and CNN devote so much ink and airtime alleging that middle-class Americans have made [...]
1Jun2008 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedOur Skyrocketing Living Standards
In the mid-1950s, when I was a young child, I would occasionally see a man walking along the street with a grapefruit-size growth in his throat. The first time I saw such a thing I gasped. My mother hushed me up and told me later that the man had a goiter. The last time I [...]
1Sep2007 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedResearch Needed!
If you’re an economics graduate student looking for a good dissertation topic, this is your lucky day. Here are two topics that I sincerely believe are worthwhile, challenging, and—if done well—could launch you into academic stardom. The first topic is best expressed as a question: how much of our material standard of living do we [...]
1Sep2005 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat’s Wrong with the Poverty Numbers
Last fall the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty in the United States. The report indicated that the number of people below the official poverty line had risen from 32.9 million in 2001 to 34.6 million in 2002. Worse, the official poverty rate had risen from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.1 [...]
1Apr2004 | Robert P. Murphy | 1 comment | ContinuedFree Trade: Key to Peace and Prosperity
Contributing editor William Peterson (whpeterson@ aol.com) is an adjunct scholar with the Heritage Foundation. At a time of international tension and a so-so economy, we are fortunate that the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has issued its essay (online or in hard copy) “The Fruits of Free Trade.” It comes from the Dallas Fed’s 2002 [...]
1Jan2004 | William H. Peterson | 1 comment | ContinuedCan You Spot the Billionaire?
A Canadian student once confessed to me the confusion and anger he suffers whenever any of his friends move to the United States. I asked him why he feels this way. He replied that he “could never live in a country with such a high Gini coefficient.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of income [...]
1Jan2004 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 25 comments | ContinuedSaving the Environment for a Profit, Victorian-Style
Pierre Desrochers is research director at the Montreal Economic Institute (www.iedm.org). In the mind of the 21st-century environmentalist, Victorian cities and towns evoke images of black coal smoke and unsanitary conditions. For most people of the time though, they were one of humanity’s supreme achievements. Not as clean as the countryside, no doubt, but thriving [...]
1May2003 | Pierre Desrochers | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Transfer Society
The story of Robinson Crusoe has been used to illustrate many economic points. So let’s try this question. What if, instead of working and cooperating to produce as much food, shelter, clothing, and other goods as they could, Crusoe and Friday instead spent most of their time fighting over the division of what nature readily [...]
1Aug2002 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Rise of the West
Throughout almost the entire span of human history, material privation and chronic insecurity were the norm. Not even those at the peaks of social status and political power could enjoy the creature comforts and consumer delights that “poor” people take for granted in the West today. At times, certain populations fared somewhat better—in ancient Greece [...]
1Jul2002 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Economics of Infantilism
While this year’s Winter Games were still going on, the website of the National Organization for Women was complaining that with all the Olympic coverage, the press had neglected to notice the 400-person rally, dubbed the “March for Our Lives,” held simultaneously in Salt Lake City. Led by organizations from the Poor People’s Economic Human [...]
1Jun2002 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 1 comment | ContinuedThe 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 | and W. Michael Cox | 1 comment | ContinuedHow the Computer Emancipated the American Corporation
Larry Schweikart teaches history at the University of Dayton. It’s pretty common knowledge that we have entered the “information age” and that information technologies have dramatically changed business in America and in the rest of the world. Currently, there is a heated debate raging about the standard of living in the United States—particularly in the [...]
1Mar2001 | Larry Schweikart | 0 comments | Continued-
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