Chapter 16 Price Controls
“Inflation and Price Control”
Chapter 15 The Hampered Market Economy
“Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism”
Chapter 14 Labor Productivity, Wages, and Unemployment
“Wages, Unemployment and Inflation”
Chapter 13 The Business Cycle
It is a fundamental fact of human behavior that people value present goods higher than future goods. An apple available for immediate consumption is valued higher than an apple which will be available next year.
Chapter 12 The Interest Rate
It has been shown that time preference is a category inherent in every human action. Time preference manifests itself in the phenomenon of originary interest, i.e., the discount of future goods as against present goods.
225 years ago today, the first ten amendments were added to the new Constitution of 1787. Those amendments have come to be known as the Bill of Rights, and taken as a whole, these amendments represent what can only be described as one of the few parts of the Constitution worth applauding today.
Many drug law reformers are frightful over who President-elect Donald Trump will appoint to his cabinet to oversee the war on drugs. Might there be a crackdown and reversal of marijuana law reform? While a president’s cabinet choices are always a concern, a big picture analysis shows that efforts to legalize and decriminalize drugs are spreading and going global. The war on drugs is shrinking, not expanding.
Do gifts destroy value? Are they a drag on the economy, as many economists suggest?
In “The economist’s guide to gift-giving” at FT, Tim Harford collects the research of these economists who say that “Gifts typically destroy value. The total deadweight loss of Christmas in the US alone was $12bn.”
It finally happened. The Fed raised interest rates a quarter of a percentage point for the first time in 2016, after forecasting four rate hikes a year ago.
