History
Iowa’s “Butter-Margarine War”: T. W. Schultz’s Fight for Academic Freedom
During the Second World War, economists at Iowa State College published a pamphlet titled “Putting Dairying on a War Footing,” which would later come...
James M. Buchanan Trusted Market Mechanisms Because He Trusted Individuals
James Buchanan, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, believed that individuals were able to voluntarily devise private and market-like institutional...
What Stakeholder Capitalism Can Learn From Jensen and Meckling
Jensen and Meckling’s 1976 article is an academic classic, but heavily criticized by stakeholder capitalists for arguing that corporate structures should be designed to...
An Unusual History: A Conversation Between Two Economists About the Economics Department at the University of Chicago
In conversation with Sebastian Edwards, Arnold C. Harberger reflects on his time at the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.
Editor’s note: The...
Why We Need To Re-think Friedman’s Ideas About Monopolies
Friedman’s New York Times Magazine article on the social purpose of business was a specific intervention in the debate over shareholder activism and mentions...
Are Intellectual Property Rights Neoliberal? Yes and No
Today’s global IP regime is often described by critical scholars bluntly as “neoliberal.” But in fact, the topic of intellectual property rights has been...
The Most Famous Article on the Theory of the Firm is Widely Misunderstood
Michael Jensen and William Meckling’s famous 1976 Journal of Financial Economics article has been cited nearly 100,000 times and is often regarded as a...
“Power Is Evil in Itself”: The Ordoliberal Quest for a Privilege-Free Order
The lesson from the quest of German ordoliberals for a privilege-free order from the 1930s to the 1950s is that once in motion, the...
Here Is What American History Can Teach Us About the Interplay Between Free Speech and Democracy
The United States has a long and unfortunate history of overreacting in moments of perceived crisis. Time and again, we have suppressed dissent, imprisoned...
The Economic Costs of Discriminating Against Top Talent: Insights From Nazi Germany
A new study looks at the discrimination of Jewish managers in Germany in the 1930s and shows how the rise of a discriminatory ideology...
