The Independent Review

Evidence from laboratory experiments starting in the 1980s seemed to produce conflicting accounts of what a reasonable set of assumptions about human behavior might look like. On the one hand, people were behaving with greater levels of trust and coo

Governments weakened by violent internal conflict fail to administer justice or protect private property, undermining the process of economic development. Given the acute constraints facing formal governance in this context, governance rooted in info

Humanomics strives to understand economics as a humanistic science.2 It thus seeks to understand economic activity in terms of the whole human being and not as an exclusively self-interested utility maximizer (homo economicus). The experiments of Ver

The study of political economy aims to help us understand how government can work most efficiently in society. For what social functions are government financing and management necessary or superior to other institutional arrangements? When governmen

Deregulation is contentious. Market-friendly citizens (and businesses) both demand and rejoice in government deregulation. Their market-critical counterparts fear government deregulation and lament every step toward it. For both sides, deregulation i

How do private property rights come into being, and what factors explain why privatization efforts are more effective in some contexts than others? Demsetz (1964, 1967, 2002) argues that property rights will be established when the costs of privatizi

Canada is just one of many countries raising taxes on those of high wealth. Is this justified? Great wealth is criticized, among other reasons, simply for being unequal, which of course it is. One reply to this is: Well, so what? Nature visits us wit

In 1970, the New York Times published an article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” written by the American economist and future Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. Friedman wrote to an audience of corporate execut

The COVID-19 pandemic saw a surge in discussions of public health. Both the federal government and states passed legislation in an effort to combat the spread of illness and “flatten the curve” (Williams 2020). According to health care professionals,

By Ronald J. Daniels (with Grant Shreve and Phillip Spector) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021 Pp. x, 322. $29.95 hardcover. Reading Ronald J. Daniels’s What Universities Owe Democracy three years after its publication feels like an exe

By Alexander William Salter Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2023. Pp. 238. $24.95 paperback. Early hominids may have allocated resources before humans had the concepts “allocation” and “resources” or knew they did. Either way,

By Joseph E. Stiglitz New York: W. W. Norton, 2024. Pp. 356. $29.99 hardcover. Joseph Stiglitz has written a book entirely devoted to a critique of Milton Friedman’s (1962, Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press) and Friedrich H

By Kohei Saito New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii, 276. $22.99 paperback. It isn’t often you read a book that advocates for arguably the two most evil, destructive ideas ever advocated: Marxist communism and economic degrowth. One w

By Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott New York: Simon and Schuster, 2023. Pp. xiii, 443. $29.99 hardcover. I find myself writing this review in the wake of the attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, of former president Donald Trump. Little el