Freedom and Flourishing

  Alexander Hamilton was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He served as secretary to the Treasury from 1789 to 1795 during t...

  In the most popular post on my blog, written in 2009, I asked: What are the characteristics of a good society? I began the post by sugges...

  David Schmidtz advocates “ecological justice” in his book, Living Together : Inventing Moral Science. Although Schmidtz does not refer to ...

  I don’t think anyone has ever asked me the question posed above. When I tell people that I am an economist, some of them ask about my view...

  This question is posed in the title of Chapter 10 of Steven Pinker’s book , Rationality: What it is, Why it Seems Scarce, Why it Matters. ...

  Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi have contributed an excellent history of libertarian ideas in their recently published book, The Individual...

 An obvious answer to the question posed above is that governments determine how much liberty people enjoy. But that response may be too gli...

  This is a companion piece to the preceding post in which I considered the extent to which international differences in personal freedom r...

  The accompanying graph shows that personal freedom tends to be greatest in countries where people hold the most emancipative values (on av...

  When I think of Sweden, what comes to mind is a big government welfare state, with higher priority being given to economic security than t...

  Why should you care about the economic opportunities available to the people of Papua New Guinea?   Perhaps some readers didn’t even know ...