Free Republic

“Economic Facts and Fallacies” by Thomas Sowell came out in 2008, but like many of Thomas Sowell’s other books on economics, it remains a classic. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this book? How does it compare to his other major works?

According to a new study of clay pots and ceramic tablets discovered almost 70 years ago in Harappa, now in Pakistan, the people of the Indus Valley had a detailed system of commodity value, weights and measures. Dr Bryan Wells, a researcher based at India's Institute of Mathematical Sciences, told The Daily Telegraph he had begun work on his thesis ten years ago when he first saw photographs of the clay pots with markings which appeared to be in proportion to their relative size. But he was not able to test his thesis until he visited New Delhi earlier this...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested Tuesday that countries facing sanctions like Iran, Turkey and Russia may start doing business in their national currencies, suggesting that the days of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency may be numbered. Perhaps no one would be happier about that than President Donald Trump. Here’s why: As Yale economist Robert Tiffin explained in the 1950s, if a country’s currency is the international reserve currency, then it has no choice but to run a current account deficit. If a replacement is found, as the dollar replaced the British pound in the 1920s, it...

Today, June 5th, is the anniversary of the birth of John Maynard Keynes, once upon a time the great foe of the gold standard. Today also, coincidentally, happens to be the anniversary of the date celebrated of FDR’s “taking America off the gold standard.” These events are not mere historical curios. The current presidential campaign, and underlying political climate, shows we are finally, maybe definitively, emerging from the academic economists’ anathema on the gold standard... ...Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is on record as strongly appreciating the gold standard... ...The “interwar gold standard” in fact was a barbarous relic....

For everyone but the top 1 percent of earners, the American economy is broken. Since the 1980s, there has been a widening disconnect between the lives lived by ordinary Americans and the statistics that say our prosperity is growing. Despite the setback of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy more than doubled in size during the last three decades while middle-class incomes and buying power have stagnated.... (yet) for too many families, the American Dream is becoming more a historical memory than an achievable reality. These facts do not just highlight the issues of inequality and the growing power of...

Peter Drucker wrote the first version of this book during Hitler's rise to power. Most explanations for the rise of fascism focused on political reasons or economic ones, while Drucker explains the social movements that made leaders like Mussolini and Hitler possible. It also explains what is (and isn't) fascism, how they hobble their own economies, and the social warpage they create. Peter Drucker updated "The End of Economic Man" in the 1960s, seeing horrifying parallels between the 1960s activism and the 1930s. And while history does not repeat, it rhymes - and this book explains the social trends that...

Yesterday would have been the 103rd birthday of Milton Friedman, who was one of the most brilliant economists of the last century. In honor of Friedman, here are his 20 best quotes. 20) “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” 19) “Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny,...

Paul Krugman has become an embarrassment to the economics profession. Despite his Nobel Prize and despite his previous high regard in the profession, his twice-a-week editorials in The New York Times are causing even progressive economists to treat him as somewhat of a kook.Since 2011, the United States has followed what Krugman correctly calls a policy of “austerity.” For example, the federal budget deficit has declined from 8.4 percent of GDP in 2011 to a predicted 2.9 percent of GDP for all of 2014. All along the way Paul Krugman protested that such policies would prolong the recession and even...

Question: Hello Paul! Do you ever plan to present the ideas of economists that adhere to the Austrian School of Economics (Students of Von Hayek or Von Mises)? Their understanding of the nature and causes of the business cyle enabled them to foresee much of what has happened in the last few years. (Peter Schiff and Marc Faber are successful examples.) Thanks for your friendly commentary!Paul Solman: Yes, the resurgence of the Austrian School is worth a look, and was suggested to me by none other than Robert MacNeil a few weeks ago after Rand Paul's victory in Kentucky. Look...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Home building projects started in June surprisingly rose 9.1 percent due chiefly to a change in New York City building codes that, if it were ignored, would have seen starts decrease by 4.0 percent, a government report said on Thursday. The Commerce Department said housing starts set an annual pace of 1.066 million units in June, the highest since February. Economists polled ahead of the report were expecting a 960,000 unit rate. New York City enacted a new set of construction codes effective July 1, that largely explained an 11.6 percent increase in building permits and the...