I’m reading this for some ongoing research on lynching, crime, and the Southern economy. It’s a defense of lynching in the form of a short novel featuring predictably one-dimensional characters and racist tropes. It’s a quick read and a useful foray into the rhetoric of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century racism. Here’s some commentary on […]
Here’s a list of some of my favorite Econ Ed resources: MRUniversity. I teach from Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s Modern Principles textbook. This site features loads of videos and mini-courses that can be adapted to any econ course. LearnLiberty. I’ve made a lot of videos for LearnLiberty, which is an online project of the Institute […]
A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor’s Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace― Brian Zahnd “In short the problem is this: far too few who believe in the risen Christ actually believe in his revolutionary ideas. There is a sense in which we create religion as a category to keep Jesus from meddling with […]
Welcome to my new blog! This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve blogged for Division of Labour, the Mises Institute, the Independent Institute, Kosmos Online, and EconLog, I write a periodic column for Forbes.com, and I’ve recently started blogging for LearnLiberty. In addition to my research and classroom teaching, I do a lot of writing by […]
Reading the Bible is harder than you think, even with e-readers and the Holy Bible app. It’s just a whole lot easier to scroll mindlessly (and soullessly) through Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit which offer compact snippets of the world in the form of cat pictures, inspiring quotes, and political rants filled with grammatical atrocities. The […]
Price “gouging” is not a moral issue. It’s an economic issue with *beneficial* humanitarian consequences. Counterintuitive as it may seem, high gas prices from natural disasters send two very powerful signals into the market: they tell gas producers to produce more, and they tell gas consumers to consume less. After disasters, the news wires fill […]
In no particular order, over the last few months. Father Goose. One of my wife’s family’s all-time favorites. I haven’t watched it in years. The kids thought it hilarious, and it’s a very, very good movie. Cary Grant delivers an excellent performance as a crusty and bitter drunkard suddenly surrounded by a very prim and […]
At the end of January, CNN reported that in response to new tariffs on solar panels, Chinese solar panel manufacturer JinkoSolar would build a plant in the United States. These tariffs make Americans poorer, not richer. The nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat exhorted us to look beyond what is immediately apparent to the harder-to-see but […]
1. People are very tribal, and the more I’ve read scholars like Robin Hanson and Jonathan Haidt, the more I’ve become convinced that a lot of what we do is about showing which team we’re on rather than pursuing truth or effecting change. Given that this is the most likely motivation for action, people are […]
After reading How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia, I found that it was a useful refresher. I already write a lot, but one of the things that keeps me going–and that helps me to write better–is that I read a lot of books like this. Even when I don’t really learn anything […]
I spent part of the second week of August in an apartment in Brooklyn that my wife and I had rented with Airbnb. We were in town to celebrate her birthday, and we had a great time visiting the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, and some of the great restaurants Brooklyn and Manhattan have […]
Consider this: we live in a world in which drivers will speed up in order to prevent you from getting over even though you very clearly had your turn signal on. It’s a minor annoyance with major political implications. Friedrich Hayek put it this way throughout his work: the social problem is not designing institutions […]
“If truth is no longer discovered by observation, reasoning, and argument, but by uncovering hidden causes which, unknown to the thinker, have determined his conclusions, if whether a statement is true or false is no longer decided by logical argument and empirical tests, but by examining the social position of the person who made it, […]
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job […]
