As The United States approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026, there is no better time to study the great men and women who built, protected, and improved the nation. Many historians regard Abraham Lincoln as America’s greatest President, for good reason. Lincoln mended the fractured United States, wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, and gave some of the most impactful speeches in American history. Through examining three of Lincoln’s speeches, EconTalk host Russ Roberts and Diana Schaub show how Lincoln’s commitment to the principles of the founding, and vision for a freer and more united f ..read more

As I write this, much digital ink is being spilled on inflationary pressures from Trump’s latest round of tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China.  These are our three biggest trading partners, representing vast amounts of goods over many industries and sectors, affecting both American consumers and American firms alike.  Price concerns are legitimate.  But we must differentiate between changes in prices and inflation.  Tariffs will cause a one-time increase in prices, but all else held equal, prices will not continue to rise.  The 2018 tariffs on washing machines present ..read more

There is something that, I think, libertarians have learned, or should be learning, from the current American administration about the rule of law. One illustration among many was provided on March 13 when Ursula von der Leyen announced the European Union’s response to Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. (See “EU and Canada Retaliate after Donald Trump’s Metals Tariffs Take Effect,” Financial Times, March 12, 2025, which includes a short video of von der Leyen’s announcement.) As the president of the European Commission, the deep-state arm of the EU government, she spoke in a ca ..read more

Economists are often criticized for assuming people behave like homo economicus – some kind of perfectly rational machine making emotionless decisions based entirely on money. Of course, no competent economist actually thinks this way, just as no competent physicist believes that billiard balls are perfectly round spheres operating in a vacuum on a perfectly flat, frictionless surface. But just as a physicist, while playing a game of pool, might find it useful to model the pool balls and table as if that was the case, there are also cases where economic models might usefully employ s ..read more

Bloomberg has an article with the following title and subhead: How Torsten Slok Solved the ‘Sherlock Holmes Mystery’ of the Economy When others thought a recession was inevitable, Apollo’s chief economist correctly predicted more growth. He did it by looking at the data.  Sløk seems to be one of the few economic pundits that is able to avoid the temptation to reason from a price change: Adding to the difficulty, the 54-year-old has lately concluded that much of the economics he learned at school is broken. After the punishing series of rate hikes that began in 2022, the field’s models c ..read more

I gave an OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) talk on Tuesday on President Trump’s economic policies and actions. As you might imagine, it was pretty negative–on failure to cut major spending programs, on cracking down on both illegal and legal immigration, and on tariffs. The one potentially bright spot was on DOGE. I led by telling them that I don’t have a DOG in the hunt. But I pointed out something about DOGE’s limits that I learned from my research and also from a discussion with a fellow economist. From my research Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Bourne noted, in “Six Ways to Understand DO ..read more

DEI is often criticized as a modern religion. Without getting into the weeds of that discussion, I would say that my attitude toward DEI, broadly understood, actually does fit neatly into the First Amendment’s view of religion – that the state should pass no law establishing it, nor prohibit the free exercise thereof. Many companies have recently scaled back their DEI programs. Others have chosen to keep them. I’m content to let companies make their own decisions about who they want to hire and on what basis. My concern as a consumer is if the company is serving my wants or needs at the end of ..read more

On March 4, I had the great pleasure of giving a talk at UW – Superior on my research on cascading expert failure (ungated version here).  You can find a video of the talk on my YouTube channel .  Thanks to Dr Joshua K. Bedi for hosting and for the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue for sponsoring the event. In the talk, I discuss how the decision early in the pandemic to reserve COVID-19 tests to just hospital cases led to cascading expert failure.  I failed, however, to bring that story to its conclusion, so I rectify that here. By restricting tests to hos ..read more

A recent essay by Eugene Ludwig published by Politico argues that despite most economic data showing a healthy US economy in 2024, things are actually really bad. He tries to convince us by providing alternative data. However, a close examination of his alternative data is unconvincing. These alternative measures are not better measures of labor markets and personal income are faring in the US. And even by many of the alternative measures, Americans are still doing well economically. The Labor Market Ludwig presents a measure of “true” unemployment, developed by his own organization, which sug ..read more

If you seek his monument, look around. I learned yesterday that Manny Klausner died recently at age 85. Photo credit Reason magazine. I remember Murray Rothbard referring to H.L. Mencken as the “joyous libertarian.” For me, Manny was the joyous libertarian. My late friend Harry Watson and I came down from Canada in September 1972 to start in the Ph.D. economics program at UCLA. We had been reading Reason magazine regularly and following the libertarian movement that way and through other publications. We were charmed by much of what we read. So we arrived somewhat familiar with the American li ..read more