Media and Culture

Doug French reviews the hit economics book Freakonomics.

Pundits and bloggers are addicted to decrying the supposed cell-phone addiction of Americans, writes Jeffrey Tucker. Actually, there is a rational explanation for why we observe so much cell-phone yammer and why we find it so alarming.

What's the best book on money ever written? That's an easy one: What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray N. Rothbard. The Mises Institute is bringing out a new edition, and uniting it with Rothbard's radical blueprint for monetary reform. You can help.

In a series of editorials cleverly disguised as news stories, the New York Times is using highly misleading data to stoke envy and class hatred. George Reisman takes apart the latest in the series.

Every season there is a new contender for the conservative mini-treatise of the day. Usually written by the newest would-be Buckley, it offers readers a new way of understanding the ideological climate and a new perspective on how conservatives should fit within it.

Is Freakonomics worth the hype? Yes and no, in Robert Murphy's opinion.

It’s cheap, compact, durable, and superior in many aspects to online and print publishing.

The Rube Goldberg machine: some crazy convoluted way of accomplishing a task that would otherwise be quite simple. A perfect way to describe the Clinton health care plan and emerging Social Security reform.

We tend to think of economics as a sterile, number-clotted discipline, writes Colby Cosh, but most of the great economists have antagonized the received wisdom of their day.

The economy is not depression proof, writes Lew Rockwell. If the government and the Federal Reserve are willing to work hard enough, they can kill off even the most robust economic expansion.