Note: This is post #109 in a weekly video series on basic economics. Rather than moving at a steady pace, economic growth ebbs and flows and has booms and busts. Economists refer to these ups and downs around a country’s long-term GDP growth trend as “business fluctuations.” In this video by Marginal Revolution University, Alex Tabarrok discusses one of the most significant forms of fluctuations: recessions. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend watching them...

On a recent episode of this Fox News show,Tucker Carlson called on Congress to ban smartphones for children. Those who assume Carlson is still a conservative might be confused by his abandonment of limited government and his embrace of a nanny-state policy. But this latest call for government to intervene in the lives of Americans is in keeping with Carlson’s drift from conservatism to nationalism—a shift that is ing mon on the right side of the political spectrum. Because it...

One of the fiercest villains in the Marvel universe is Thanos – but he pales parison to economist and clergyman Thomas Malthus. An AEI scholar has produced a video refuting them both in less than one minute. “Thanos’ plan to wipe out half the universe is based in the real-world economics of Thomas Robert Malthus,” explains the video’s description. Malthus believed that the human race found itself in a vicious circle: Technological improved agricultural yield, which in turn increased population....

Contrary to the trite assertion made every year by people who don’t know how to appreciate football, it is not really true that mercials are the best thing about the Super Bowl (at least not always). Sure, it may seem that way because the television viewer is mercials than actual game play (in an average game, theratio mercials to playing time is seven to one). The reality, though, is that most of mercials aren’t all that memorable. Only a few...

Last week the Think Tank and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania released their 2018 think tank rankings. These results rank think tanks both overall and by category, with various classifications according to geography, policy focus, and so on. The survey results cover more than 8,000 think tanks around the world; the Acton Institute was ranked #158 in the world and #27 in the US overall. Acton was also ranked in several individual categories. Acton University, for instance,...

The Kantian dream of undoing real nations keeps foundering on the shoals of human nature’s need for real attachments to place, says Acton research director Samuel Gregg in a new article for Law & Liberty: If there’s anything that political earthquakes like Brexit and the ongoing spread of nationalist feeling throughout the European Union demonstrates, it’s that popular support for Europe’s integration project is floundering. In early 2018, France’s pro-EU president Emmanuel Macron publicly acknowledged that France would probably vote...

More than 20 years after his death, Murray Rothbard continues to surprise us with his unique interpretations and insights that go far beyond the realm of economics. Rothbard’s The Progressive Era, (Mises Institute, 2017) is the latest example of this genial mind ranging over U.S. history. Rothbard’s book is a series of different studies, some already published and others not, written over decades, which focus on the Progressive Era and its direct consequence, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Over...

Democratic socialism is hot in the United States right now. Both the American media and young people seem to be enamored of the thought of steeply progressive, redistributive tax rates designed to achieve some vision of justice. As with most public policy ideas, we tend to get pretty far down the road before we ask basic questions related to the project. In other words, we imagine a result that appeals to us before we’ve really considered whether other effects are...