I’m an associate professor of economics at Grove City College, where I love introducing students to the economic point of view. My first book, listed below, pursues the relentless logic of tradeoffs. My second book (co-authored with Art Carden), Mere Economics: Lessons for and from the Ordinary Business of Life, is due out in early 2025. It examines how human beings expand their options through cooperation. For me, internalizing the economic point of view is a lifelong project. I think it will become yours, too, if you try these books!
I wrote
No Free Lunch: Six Economic Lies You've Been Taught And Probably Believe
This is the rare book that is as eye-opening for the novice in economics as it is stimulating for the professional economist. Hazlitt will show you why economics is the golden key to unlocking an endless series of social mysteries.
If you really take his classic 1946 “Lesson” to heart, you can outthink many professional economists who have mistaken mathematical pyrotechnics for economic insight.
With over a million copies sold, Economics in One Lesson is an essential guide to the basics of economic theory. A fundamental influence on modern libertarianism, Hazlitt defends capitalism and the free market from economic myths that persist to this day.
Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was a libertarian philosopher, an economist, and a journalist. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine, an influential libertarian publication. Hazlitt wrote…
The greatest book ever written in economics isn’t Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, or John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory, but this book by Ludwig von Mises. If you only ever read one book in economics, make it this one—even if it takes five years to traverse. You’ll be digesting the insights for a lifetime.
Everything is here. How we ought to think about economics. How we can most fruitfully analyze society. How can humans live better together than they could apart? What makes some societies rich and others poor? Mises originally thought of calling the book “Social Cooperation,” two words that deftly capture the essence of this 800+ page treatise.
The great book first appeared in German in 1940 and then disappeared, only to reappear in English in 1949. It was a sensation, the largest and most scientific defense of human freedom ever published. And now, in 2010, the seemingly impossible has happened: Human Action, the masterwork of the ages, is in a pocketbook edition at a ridiculously low price.
History might record that this edition is the one that changed the world. Mises's fantastic and timeless treatise has never been in a more portable, giftable edition.
Just imagine: giving or receiving this gem, this treasure, as a stocking stuffer!…
Ask ten different people to define economics, and you’ll get ten different answers. Does it have something to do with money, finance, the “economy”? Is it about wealth creation? Worse, does it assume people are self-centered greed monsters who care only about maximizing their own happiness, which is assumed to be achievable solely through material acquisition? Worse still, does economics justify or condone such behavior?
Kirzner’s book, which was his dissertation written under the guidance of Ludwig von Mises, shows us the way out of this mess. Read this book to learn why economics is the best tool we have for making sense of the social world. Plus, no unrealistic assumptions about humans are needed!
The inaugural volume in Liberty Fund's new Collected Works of Israel M Kirzner series, "The Economic Point of View" contains Kirzner's 1960 doctoral dissertation under Ludwig von Mises, a work that established Kirzner as a careful and meticulous scholar of economics.
Thomas Sowell is underrated. How is a world-renowned thinker and commentator still underestimated? Many people think of Sowell as little more than a cultural commentator or an ideologue.
This book shatters those misconceptions by introducing you to the depth and clarity of Sowell’s thoughts. Reading and re-reading this book will impress you with the power of the economic point of view. Read it after Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.
With a new preface by the author, this reissue of Thomas Sowell's classic study of decision making updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Annointed , Sowell, one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making,a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency, but our very freedom because actual knowledge gets replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision f what ought to…
Whether you instantly recognize this book as economics depends on whether you internalized the last quarter of Kirzner’s The Economic Point of View. Economics is not merely about human behavior in one narrow domain (say, traditional markets using traditional money).
Wherever human beings make choices, economics applies. Read this book, and marvel as your economic intuition expands with every page.
Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss - it's time to go a-pirating! "The Invisible Hook" takes readers inside the wily world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates' notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior. Why did pirates fly flags of Skull & Bones? Why did they create a 'pirate code'? Were pirates really ferocious madmen? And what made them so successful? "The Invisible Hook" uses economics to examine these and other infamous aspects of piracy. Leeson argues that the pirate customs we know and love resulted…
Most people don't think economics can be life-changing because they confuse it with forecasting, charts, diagrams, numbers, math, and politics. This book will change all of that. In plain English, I share how economics is about people, how they pursue their dreams, and what hinders them along the way.
I show how you've been too easily persuaded by pithy catchphrases and bumper-sticker slogans, even outright lies, that fail to grapple with the rich complexity of your life and human society as a whole. You'll be offended when you realize you've been "had" but ultimately relieved when you see economics and your life through a new lens.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
