When people bump up against one another in the course of pursuing their goals, it is in everyone's interest to resolve any resulting problems in the ….

If top marginal income tax rates are set too high, they discourage productive economic activity. In the limit, a top marginal income tax rate of 100 ….

Adam Smith's uncritically enthusiastic modern disciples portray his invisible hand theory as saying that market forces reliably harness selfish indiv….

We've long known that firms can pay higher wages if they spend less on workplace safety enhancement. Libertarians ask, "If a worker is willing to acc….

As economists have long noted, the puzzle is not that so few people vote, it's that so many do. After all, no individual's vote has ever tipped the b….

Many social critics wag their fingers at what they perceive to be frivolous luxury spending. But that misses the point that consumption norms are loc….

Questions like, "Is my suit OK?", or "Is my job performance satisfactory?", are impossible to think about in the absence of a suitable frame of refer….

Many decry rising inequality because it makes those who've fallen behind feel impoverished. But it's done much more than cause hurt feelings. It has ….

Unless we can act collectively, there would be no way to defend ourselves, no way to define or enforce property rights. We couldn't curb congestion o….

Trusting others puts us at risk. Yet failure to trust entails risk as well. The ability to navigate through this minefield successfully is one of lif….

One reason that might motivate a worker to accept a riskier job at higher pay, for example, would be that doing so would enable him to bid more effec….

We could curtail private spending by several trillion dollars a year without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. That would be more than enough….

Pass down values every day through your actions, your words and your time with your kids..

Only the federal government has the power to spend beyond its current revenue. It shouldn't do that when the economy is at full employment. But it's ….

The link between rational individual behavior and collectively desirable outcomes is extremely tenuous..

Life is graded on the curve. It's not how big you are, how strong you are, how smart you are. It's how good you are at the things that count relative….

All parents want to send their children to the best possible schools. But because a good school is a relative concept, a family cannot achieve its go….

As John Maynard Keynes taught us in the 1930s, in such situations, government is the only entity with both the motive and the ability to boost total ….

When the economic pie grows larger, it's always possible for everyone to have a larger slice than before. So it's really in all of our interest to ma….

If the search is for examples that contradict the predictions of standard economic models, a good rule of thumb is to start in France..

The private sector is first of all much larger than the public sector. The waste we see in that sector does not result from the fact that people spen….