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Fans of economist Milton Friedman--of whom I'm one--should count themselves lucky that Stanford historian Jennifer Burns has written a detailed biography of him. Based on intensive archival research that only [...]

Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality By Angus Deaton 271 pp.; Princeton University Press, 2023 Economist Angus Deaton was born and educated in Britain and [...]

At what point should a potential therapy be deemed effective? Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, humanity has been searching for effective treatments and preventatives for the virus. Responses [...]

Can Legal Weed Win? By Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner 211 pp.; University of California Press, 2022 As more and more state governments legalize recreational use of marijuana--14 had done [...]

In our recent Regulation article 'Ivermectin and Statistical Significance' (Spring 2022), we looked at the empirical evidence and debate over whether the antiparasitic drug ivermectin helps prevent or treat COVID-19 [...]

The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette By Jacob Grier 267 pp.; Jacob Grier, 2019 When I taught benefit-cost analysis at the Naval Postgraduate [...]

The Economist's View of the World By Steven E. Rhoads 312 pp.; Cambridge University Press, 2021 In the late 1980s, I wrote a fan letter to University of Virginia professor [...]

A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America By Scott W. Atlas, M.D. 352 pp.; Bombardier Books, 2021 Was the [...]

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market By Nicholas Wapshott 367 pp.; W.W. Norton, 2021 British journalist Nicholas Wapshott, who earlier wrote Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern [...]

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be By Diane Coyle 257 pp.; Princeton University Press, 2021 In her latest book, Cogs and Monsters, University of Cambridge [...]

When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason By John Tamny 286 pp.; Post Hill Press, 2021 John Tamny bravely describes the terrible and [...]

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America By Conor Dougherty 288 pp.; Penguin Press, 2020 Finally, a book by a New York Times reporter who understands the crucial link between [...]

The Cost-Benefit RevolutionBy Cass R. Sunstein266 pp.; MIT Press, 2018In his preface to The Cost-Benefit Revolution, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein writes something that readers may not expect:An approving nod [...]

As a long-time advocate of expanded immigration, I am delighted +to have left / liberal Matthew Yglesias as an ally. Yglesias, who helped found online magazine Vox, is one of [...]

Some acquaintances recently paddled surfboards and kayaks into the Pacific to disperse a relative's ashes where he loved to surf. During the memorial service, one brother of the deceased expressed [...]

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind By Raguran Rajan 434 pp.; Penguin Press, 2019 In his latest book, Raghuram Rajan, a chaired professor of [...]

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism By Anne Case and Angus Deaton 312 pp.; Princeton University Press, 2020 In their recent book Deaths of Despair and the Future [...]

The Cigarette: A Political History By Sarah Milov 394 pp.; Harvard University Press, 2019 Sarah Milov's The Cigarette: A Political History is accurately subtitled. Milov, a history professor at the [...]

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less By Garett Jones 233 pp.; Stanford University Press, 2020 One of the principles [...]

In Radical Markets, University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner and Microsoft senior researcher Glen Weyl propose a radical restructuring of property rights, immigration policy, and voting, as well as [...]

One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking about Five Hard Issues that Divide Us By Peter H. Schuck 425 pp.; Princeton University Press, 2017 Three years ago in this magazine, I praised [...]

The interactions of exchange, ideas, and individuals can lead to further deregulation. Peter Van Doren and Thomas Firey lay out well the facts about the substantial reduction in regulation from [...]

What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism By Alan B. Krueger 195 pp.; Princeton University Press, 2018 In 2007, Princeton University economist Alan Krueger published a short [...]

Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now is, quite simply, a fantastic book. In this fact-filled and incredibly well-footnoted tome, Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, shows how the conditions of life for ordinary [...]

The Failed Welfare Revolution: America's Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy By Brian Steensland 304 pp.; Princeton University Press, 2018 Rarely do I enjoy a book by an author with whom [...]

Free People, Free Markets: How the Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages Shaped America By George Melloan 368 pp.; Encounter Books, 2017 The most widely read and probably the most influential [...]

Economics for the Common Good By Jean Tirole 576 pp.; Princeton University Press, 2017 In 2014, French economist Jean Tirole, chairman of the Toulouse School of Economics and the Institute [...]

The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of U.S. Entitlement Programs By John F. Cogan 512 pp.; Stanford University Press, 2017 Currently, the U.S. federal government spends about $2.4 [...]

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War By Robert J. Gordon 762 pp.; Princeton University Press, 2016 Northwestern University economist Robert [...]

US. drug pricing is in the crosshairs. Martin Shkreli, formerly of Turing Pharmaceuticals and KaloBios, made headlines last fall after he hiked the price for the 1950s-era drug Daraprim (pyrimethamine) [...]

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America By Richard Rothstein 345 pp.; Liveright Publishing, 2017 'We have created a caste system in this country, [...]

Milton Friedman on Freedom: Selections from The Collected Works of Milton Friedman Edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm 246 pp.; Hoover Institution Press, 2017 The late Milton Friedman [...]

Richard Posner By William Domnarski 289 pp.; Oxford University Press, 2016 Probably the best-known current federal judge who is not a Supreme Court justice is Richard Posner, who has been [...]

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream By Tyler Cowen 231 pp.; St. Martin's Press, 2017 Tyler Cowen, a prolific author and blogger and an economics professor [...]

Driving the Future: Combating Climate Change with Cleaner, Smarter Cars By Margo T. Oge 351 pp.; Arcade, 2015 In the next few years, companies that sell cars and light trucks [...]

Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present By Richard S. Newman 306 pp.; Oxford University Press, 2016 Ask any American born before 1960 for an example [...]

One of the most talked about economics books of the last few years is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It is not hard to see why. Piketty, an [...]

Walter Oi passed away this past Christmas Eve, at the age of 84. I trust that readers of this magazine already know of Walter, but most Americans don't. That's a [...]

Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few By Robert B. Reich 279 pp.; Alfred A. Knopf, 2015 Robert Reich, a former U.S. secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton [...]

Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance By John Kay 336 pp.; Public Affairs; 2015 I can't give a AAA rating to John Kay's new book on finance; it's [...]

How likely is it that the world will warm not just by 2 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century, but by 11 degrees? What would happen to the [...]

One of the greatest economics thinkers of the 20th century was the late Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek. He was Austrian in both senses of the word: he was from [...]

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajah 260 pages; Princeton University Press, 2010 Jimmy Stewart Is Dead: Ending the World's Ongoing Financial Plague [...]