I finished “Salvation.” It’s fun brain candy popcorn tv with a sort-of-cliffhanger ending that makes me think a Season 2 is coming. There’s a nice, healthy dose of skepticism that the government will do the right thing, which makes it satisfying. On the exercise bike in the basement, I watched “Omega,” which is a set […]

Niall Ferguson, Civilization. I think this is the first Ferguson book I’ve read. He writes beautifully and comprehensively. In the book I’m writing with Deirdre McCloskey—it’s based on McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality—we criticize some of Ferguson’s claims about his “killer apps,” but the book is a pretty solid survey of […]

Here’s a great article from the New York Times that discusses one of my pet peeves: “I feel like.” The law of demand doesn’t care how you feel. The statistical properties of data don’t care how you feel. Things like the law of comparative advantage are not matters of emotional intuition or feelings. They are […]

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 […]

Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This is nowhere more clearly in evidence than in the AMC hit The Walking Dead. How well will we do after the zombie apocalypse? Not well, I think—we’re a species that burns cars when a football team loses. If anything, watching The Walking Dead has made me wonder how […]

Several years ago, a counselor recommended The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions. The puritans get a bad rap, historically, and their history illustrates the complex tensions that come with fallen people following God in a fallen world. Here are two thoughts worth considering from the “The Love of Jesus,” page […]

Just so we’re clear, calling the cops because you see a large black guy in your neighborhood is harassment. This has happened to a friend with a door-to-door job in three separate neighborhoods over the last few months. And if you’re going to protest and appeal to the black male crime rate to justify your […]

The University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies sponsors an annual Summer Institute for the History of Economic Thought with excellent lectures by Deirdre McCloskey and James M. Buchanan (several by Buchanan). Of particular interest are McCloskey’s lecture and Buchanan’s talk “Chicago Thinking: Old and New.” Most students of economic thinking who are familiar […]

Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This is nowhere more clearly in evidence than in the AMC hit The Walking Dead. How well will we do after the zombie apocalypse? Not well, I think—we’re a species that burns cars when a football team loses. If anything, watching The Walking Dead has made me wonder how […]

Jesse Burkhead, Public School Finance: Economics and Politics (Syracuse, 1964). As part of an ongoing investigation of the claims in Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains,” I was led to the three editions of James M. Buchanan’s textbooks “The Public Finances.” Buchanan’s citations are sparse, but in the second edition (I think), he refers readers to […]

Here’s a great article from the New York Times that discusses one of my pet peeves: “I feel like.” The law of demand doesn’t care how you feel. The statistical properties of data don’t care how you feel. Things like the law of comparative advantage are not matters of emotional intuition or feelings. They are […]

There was a lot of hubbub about Uber’s entry into Birmingham, and a lot of people in a lot of places worry about what Uber means for “safety” and “good jobs.” There’s a lot of substitution from taxi cabs to Uber—I don’t plan to take a cab ever again, especially after Uber cut prices in […]

I know it’s “fake,” but I enjoy pro wrestling nonetheless. The best answer I’ve read from someone asked “why do you like pro wrestling?” is “it’s a live-action comic book,” and someone else has said that when you watch WWE you’re watching a show about a company putting on a wrestling show; in this sense, […]

Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: A conspiracy theory trashing the intellectual legacy of 1986 Nobel Laureate James Buchanan. Note the lack of a link: this book will worsen your understanding of the world rather than improve it. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Societies are comprised of individuals who have to make […]