James E Hartley is Professor and Chair of Economics at Mount Holyoke College. You can follow him at https://jamesehartley.com or on Twitter @JamesEHartley.
Website:https://jamesehartley.com
As economies developed, the idea that a commodity has an inherent just price faded away. We now think of the value of a thing as being a price on which a buyer and seller agree. But the legacy of this idea of a just price lingers in the popular imagination. It is an odd lingering notion, however. If asked, few people would be able to explain when a price is just.
Date posted: 2023-04-05
Solzhenitsyn's 1968 book Cancer Ward presented a metaphor of the state as a physician to capture what was happening in the Soviet Union. But the book can also help us examine American society in the Age of COVID.
Date posted: 2022-05-21
The Coronavirus epidemic has provided us with a lesson in how bureaucracies function in a time of crisis. It has also reminded us that education is more than merely transferring information. Real education takes place when the student and the professor meet face-to-face and just talk.
Date posted: 2020-04-10
Attempts to discover the effect of immigration on government budgets are highly susceptible to the decisions economists make about how to measure all those benefits and costs and how to account for the effects on the indigenous population. The quick answer to "What is the effect of immigration on government budgets?" is "It depends on how you measure it."
Date posted: 2019-11-03
How do we determine the right level of immigration? Assuming the optimal number of immigrants per year is neither zero nor infinite, what is it? Five hundred thousand? One million? Two million? Five million? If we can start our discussion about immigration from a shared set of ideals, then we can begin the laborious task of determining the levels and types of immigration that will allow the continuation of the American experiment.
Date posted: 2019-08-11