Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Byron Carson
The Costs and Choices of Kiki’s Delivery Service
Despite facing little explicit costs, Kiki’s delivery service is a costly endeavor. Fortunately, for viewers, it’s a charming lesson on the nature of costs and an introduction to James Buchanan’s work on cost and choice. Kiki’s Delivery Service, Studio Ghibli’s 1989 masterpiece, captures genuine moments of a young witch trying to make it on her own. Moreover, it highlights the fundamental nature of cost and choice.
Health on the Shelf: How Markets Made Life-Saving Inhalers Accessible
Byron B. Carson, III is an assistant professor of economics and business at Hampden-Sydney College. He is coauthor (with Dr. Robert E. Wright) of the book “Explaining Money and Banking.”
Health on the Shelf: How Markets Made Life-Saving Inhalers Accessible
A simple conversation sparked the idea for modern metered-dose inhalers, but markets made them iconic. George Maison, President of Riker Laboratories in 1955, was talking with his daughter Susie about her asthma treatments. She was unhappy with her squeeze-bulb nebulizer and asked why her treatments couldn’t be taken like her hairspray: in an aerosolized can. She saw the connection and how much easier it might be to take her medicine.
The REAL Land of Cockaigne
Grocery stores are true marvels of markets. Roast chickens don’t fly into your mouth, but they are roasting on a rotating spit in the deli section. Typical grocery stores carry thousands of items that make the land of Cockaigne look meagre. The centuries old myth and poem about Cockaigne depicts a mythical place that far exceeds the sweet joys of paradise. Sure paradise has grass and flowers and plenty of fruit, but the land of Cockaigne “offers better fare”.
Cost and Choice: Insights for Choosers
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory, by James M. Buchanan. In less than one hundred pages, James Buchanan excoriates economists—classical and modern—for their unrecognized confusions about cost. More than an insular academic debate, Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory develops a biting set of logical tools people—economists, philosophers, students, and laymen—can use to better understand human behavior in private and public settings.
What Americans Can Learn From Venezuela’s Crackdown on ‘Price Gougers’
Things are rarely so bad that decisive action by government officials can’t make things worse. In the current election, the Republicans are trying to outdo each other by proposing larger and more restrictive tariffs. The Democrats have just come out with a remarkably bad plan to outlaw “price gouging,” particularly for groceries. Such proposals get more attention from politicians at election time, because to get votes you have to show you did something.
Beijing’s Sovereign Claims for Tibet
Even a cursory knowledge about modern China reveals the contradictory conditions of increased economic freedoms with continued repression of civil and political liberty. For example, forming political parties is viewed as an unacceptable challenge to the inviolable “dictatorship of the proletariat” overseen by China’s Communist Party. However, Beijing uses heavy-handed methods to suppress non-political groups, including an “iron fist” approach to Falun Gong, a sect known for breathing exercises.
How the Ukraine War Will End
More than two years after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the war drags on with no apparent end in sight. Ukraine has recaptured 54 percent of the territory initially seized by Russia, but further offensives to push Russia out of Ukraine have stalled. Russia continues to control 18 percent of Ukraine, and recently opened a new northeastern front in the war around the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
Loury’s ‘Late Admissions’ is Right on Time
In his self-searing memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, Glenn C. Loury tells all in only the way he can. Loury’s singular journey from precocious young boy in Chicago’s South Side to one of the nation’s sharpest social critics doesn’t fit with many of the success narratives remarkable thinkers tell about themselves. You see, Loury’s account is brutally honest.
What Chalkboard Curves Ignore
Economists are famous for drawing diagrams, as so often illustrated in their traditional “chalk and talk” classroom presentations. Some of the curves involved even get named after famous users, from the Phillips curve to the Lorenz, Kuznetz and Laffer curves. The intent of such diagrams is to illustrate some economics “incentive story” or relationship in a clear visual manner in order to make it easier to “see,” retain and utilize it.
Erik Angner’s Defense of Our Dismal Discipline
Stumbling upon the Freakonomics phenomenon in the late ‘00s probably made me study economics. The books, podcasts, and informational phenomenon that University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephan Dubner launched beginning in 2005 was less economics than it was pop psychology wrapped in an economics framework.
Price Theory and Portion Sizes: Why Chipotle Got Cut for Cutting Costs
Lately, complaints have arisen on social media accusing Chipotle’s management of decreasing portion sizes and food quality standards, while simultaneously increasing prices across the board at restaurants for their bowls, burritos, and other menu items.
Cuban Food Shortages: Another Red Flag
To say that Cuba is not a “food country” is quite an understatement, now that food shortages are seemingly commonplace. Tasty food is one thing, but many people in Cuba might not have any food to begin with.
Byron Carson on Malaria's Collective Action Problem
Byron Carson is an associate professor of economics and business at Hampton-Sydney College in Virginia. He is also the author of a recently published book, Challenging Malaria, which we talk about today. He explains to us what malaria is and the different ways that individuals and private interests responded to it before the invention of pesticides.
Public Health from the People
There are many ways to privately improve public health. Such responses make use of local knowledge, entrepreneurship, and civil society and pursue standard goals of public health like controlling the spread of infectious diseases. Moreover, private responses improve overall welfare by lowering the total costs of a disease and limiting externalities.
The (Other) Cost of Inflation: Inflation Erodes More Than the Value of Money, History Shows
Across the world, people are struggling under the specter of inflation. In Venezuela, the inflation rate is 360 percent. In Argentina, it’s 160 percent. In Turkey, inflation is about 50 percent, than its neighbor Iran. In Europe, has finally cooled to about 3 percent, down from more than 10 percent a year ago. Canada and the United States have witnessed a similar pattern.
Podcast: How free is your state?
How free is your state? Why has New York gone from a beacon of liberty to a state that people now flee in droves? And why are people moving to places like Florida, New Hampshire and South Dakota? Way back in the early 2000s, Jason Sorens paired up with now-AIER president William Ruger to find out. Jason joined Kate Wand on Liberty Curious to discuss his book, Freedom In the Fifty States, and the interactive tool that measures economic and personal freedom across American states.
This Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: Maybe You Don’t Need a Can Opener
People love to laugh, and economists are easy targets. As Michael Munger explains, jokes can be a great teaching tool. A classic joke at the expense of the dismal scientists runs as follows: A chemist, a physicist, and an economist were stranded on a deserted island. They had a can of beans, but since they didn’t have a can opener, they had to devise a way to open it.
Christmas Calculations and Yuletide Yields
My father and I went to buy a Christmas tree earlier in the week. Fortunately, it wasn’t anything like the epic journey to procure a tree: There wasn’t any singing, no driving under 18-wheelers, and we didn’t need a saw. Aside from the holiday memory, the trip reinforced important lessons about economic calculation, capital values, and how interest rates help entrepreneurs husband resources over time.
Johan Norberg’s The Capitalist Manifesto: A Review
There’s a scene in the 2004 film Troy where Nestor, the Greek elder and advisor to King Agamemnon, tries to temper the latter’s hatred for Achilles. “How many battles have we won off the edge of his sword? This will be the greatest war the world has ever seen. We need the greatest warrior,” Nestor says, referring to Achilles. Similarly, a call to arms for capitalism needs the greatest capitalist.
How to Rationally Consume News
Twitter’s “Muted Words” function is a godsend. For a long time, every major event that takes place in the world — think wars, elections, politicking — has quickly generated a half-dozen new words that I ask Twitter to block from my view: “Gaza” and “Hamas” are the latest additions; “the Donald” and all versions of “election” have been there for a long time. Because of this, two beneficial things have happened to my use of this information-sharing platform.
TikTok: Five Cuts
If anything is fair to say in this world, it is that presidential candidate Nikki Haley is not a fan of TikTok. She has been saying for quite some time now that the platform needs to be banned in the United States, and some unfortunate, if predictable outbursts last week provided a whole lot of grist for that particular mill.
Thinking About the Regulation of Industrial Emissions Differently, Part I
Although freedom of expression is today under assault by extremists on both the political right and left, it endures as a fundamental liberal value. True liberals understand that no society can remain free if the government has the authority to suppress, mandate, or otherwise control freedom of peaceful expression. This reality holds for indirect government interferences with expression no less than for direct government interferences.
ESG as an Artifact of Zero Interest Rate Policy
Ladies and gentlemen, fellow panelists, thank you for being here. I’m thrilled to be not just attending but speaking at this event, for this legendary, time-honored organization. It’s all the more auspicious for me as an economist at AIER, which is hosting this event. So thank you for coming. I’ll be discussing trends in the embrace of environmental, social, and governance frameworks in the corporate world both over the last five or ten years, and particularly over the last two years.
‘The Psychology of Money’ Isn’t About Psychology or Money
In The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel argues that the “psychology of money” provides a better lens to examine financial decisions than a lens focused on dollars and cents. Such a claim might be true, and I was eager to learn, but the book does nothing to advance that argument. It is only tangentially about psychology and most definitely not about money.
Capitalism is a “DDoLL”
Capitalism is a “DDoLL.” I’m saying it in a silly way, to make it easier to remember, but the fact is that capitalist societies rest on three principles of effectiveness. As I have argued before, it is useful to think of decentralized market processes as operating withinthree concentric circles: exchange, markets, and capitalism. The key to understanding exchange is Difference (the first “D” in DDoLL). Any agreement in a barter, or simple market exchange, requires a disagreement about value.
Not Only to No Single Person, But to No Council or Senate Whatever
After decades of advocating free trade, a growing share of Republicans want to return the party to the protectionism that once defined it. This sensibility, popularized by former President Donald Trump, echoes the economically unlearned fretting with which generations of interested politicians and lobbyists rationalized trade barriers. After prolifically introducing tariffs when in office, Trump has proposed a sweeping 10-percent tariff on imports.
Items of Interest, Questions About Pencils Edition
Lara Scott, Zinnias, Leaves, Poppy Seeds, 2023, oil on wood panel, 18 x 24 inches, courtesy of the artist Joe Fyfe, Whistling in the Dark. “[T]here was a rift in Western art that some thought went from about the 11th century up until Cezanne, where the system of representation was so codified that it left the human imagination bereft, without a recourse to exercise true inventiveness.
What is a Pencil?
Many readers are familiar with Leonard Read’s classic essay “I, Pencil,” which shows how the market process facilitates cooperation amongst myriad individuals to produce simple items like a wood pencil. Echoing Hayek, Read argues that markets, price signals, and the discipline of profit and loss are wonderful because they coordinate individuals and their myriad behaviors, values, and goals. Bastiat famously recognized this when he noted that people in Paris get fed.
How Little Mound Bayou Became a Powerful Engine for African American Civil Rights and Economic Advancement
It is fair to say that no other small town has contributed so much to advancing human freedom in the United States during the twentieth century than Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Had that little community not existed, such civil rights icons as Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks might have remained invisible to history. The town was founded in 1887 by Isaiah T. Montgomery and Benjamin T.
Inflation: Expected and Unexpected Original
I’ve just completed my periodic update of business price expectations, including selling prices (the wavy solid line in the following chart) and buying prices (dashed line). I’ve juxtaposed these against actual inflation (the jagged solid line). You will notice a big spurt of actual inflation, capping off at 8 percent. In contrast, the movement of business expected inflation has been muted, not even reaching 4 percent.
Alan Blinder’s Inflationary Incoherence
“Predictions are hard, especially about the future,” the old saw goes. We economists have not clothed ourselves in glory with our forecasts. Many economics commentators confidently proclaimed inflation would be “transitory.” Instead, we got sustained price hikes, including the sharpest increases in 40 years. I myself was too sanguine about inflation, so I’m hesitant to cast stones. Nevertheless, basic honesty requires us to own our mistakes.
Where Did Early 20th Century Japan Go Wrong?
This year marks the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6th, 1945 “Fat Man” instantly killed 80,000 of Hiroshima’s residents, with the death toll rising to 141,000 in the aftermath. Then, on August 9th, “Little Boy” took the lives of more than 70,000 Nagasaki residents.
Disinflation Dreams and Keynesian Confusion Original
The Federal Reserve’s monetary tightening appears to be bringing down inflation without imposing undue burdens on the real economy. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) grew at an annualized rate of 2.0 percent in July. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, grew at an annualized rate of 1.91 percent. This is good news: High inflation is likely behind us. Judging by interest rates, monetary policy looks tight. The Fed’s interest rate target range is 5.25-5.50 percent.
ESG: A Corporate Social Credit System backed by UN & WEF
When big corporations like Target or Bud Light go blatantly Woke, to the detriment of their shareholders and profits, you might ask yourself what exactly they are doing, and why. This is where ESG comes in. ESG is Environment, Social, and Governance, three pillars of a pervasive type of corporate social credit score that businesses are pressured or incentivized to abide by.
Only a Retail Gold Standard Could Dethrone the Dollar
The BRICS bloc is remaining coy about whether a global currency will be on the agenda of its 15th summit, which is set to take place August 22 to 24 in South Africa. Experts from Joseph W. Sullivan to Jim O’Neill to the Council on Foreign Relations warn that a BRICS currency would threaten American economic hegemony. Precedent suggests, however, that dethroning the US dollar with anything short of a full retail gold standard will be difficult.
Sailing the Blue Sea? We’d Rather Propel Through…
Print There is apparently a solution to the climate crisis: sailing! This is a serious proposal by the French company Airseas, the proud creator of Seawing. This high-tech sail will, allegedly, reduce users’ greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent, and its first test run will bring it to the United States. According to the owner, who refused to reveal Seawing’s actual price, buyers will get their purchase price back in fuel savings in 2 to 5 years.
The Inverted Yield Curve and Next US Recession
Print No better, more reliable forecaster of the US business cycle has existed in recent decades than the initial shape of the US Treasury yield curve, and since last October it’s been signaling another US recession that’s likely to begin in 2024. This is important, because recessions have been associated with bear markets in stocks and bull markets in bonds. Moreover, if a recession arrives early in 2024 it may affect the US elections in November.
May 2023 Business Conditions Monthly
Print May 2023 was another month indicating mostly neutral economic trends in the American Institute for Economic Research’s Business Conditions Monthly. AIER’s Leading Indicator rose to 67 in May 2023, its highest value since July 2021. The Lagging Indicator rose from 42 in April to 50 in May, shifting from mildly contracting to a neutral bias. At 75, the Roughly Coincident Indicator shows expansion, but at the slowest pace since February 2023.
Fungi Bombs And Food Markets
Fungal attacks on food supplies are concerning, but global catastrophe is not likely. Recent commentary by Eva Stukenbrock and Sarah Gurr—published in Natureand covered by Damian Carrington in The Guardian—claims fungal attacks threaten to wreak havoc on the world’s primary foods like wheat, corn, and rice.
Vacation Ownership: The Wolf of the Vacation Industry
Print It happened again. We were sucked into another pay-for-vacations-forever presentation. The first time we were enticed by a free helicopter ride if we agreed to a “90-minute” presentation. This time we were offered a 3-night stay at a hotel and a $200 cash gift for “2-hours” of our time. We had sworn off vacation ownership after the first 90-minute timeshare sales pitch turned into a 6-hour high pressure situation. And yet here we were accepting once again.
Fungi Bombs and Food Markets
Fungal attacks on food supplies are concerning, but global catastrophe is not likely. Recent commentary by Eva Stukenbrock and Sarah Gurr—published in Natureand covered by Damian Carrington in The Guardian—claims fungal attacks threaten to wreak havoc on the world’s primary foods like wheat, corn, and rice.
Fungi Bombs and Food Markets
Print Fungal attacks on food supplies are concerning, but global catastrophe is not likely. Recent commentary by Eva Stukenbrock and Sarah Gurr—published in Natureand covered by Damian Carrington in The Guardian—claims fungal attacks threaten to wreak havoc on the world’s primary foods like wheat, corn, and rice.
Bankers and Regulators Fail Money and Banking 101
Commentary During the 2008 financial crisis, banks failed because they assumed too much credit risk by holding complex assets that defaulted. So far during the 2023 crisis, banks have failed because they took on too much interest rate risk by holding too much long-term fixed-rate debt, including U.S. Treasuries. That’s a mistake undergrad economics majors aren’t supposed to make, which raises the question of who’s running major financial intermediaries. Bank regulators make mistakes.
The Socialist Generation Debate
The current generation ofyoung people is far more sympathetic toward socialism than older people, and even more sympathetic than now-old people were when they were young. I’m not just talking about the old bromide that young socialist hearts become old capitalist brains; young people today are more sympathetic to socialism than at any point since surveys have been conducted.
Dismal is Better
Print Americans admire the rugged individualist who goes his own way, who stands alone. The problem is that standing alone at social gatherings is…lonely. And, frankly, pathetic. But that’s what usually happens to me, off in a corner, trying to pretend to study the wallpaper for clues. The problem is that I am, both by training and by temperament, an economist, and therefore dismal company.
1619, Anyone?
Print If you’ve been with us for a while, you undoubtedly know that AIER’s Phil Magness has been an outspoken critic of the New York Times 1619 Project. You can have a look at his conversation with Bill Walton, or read his analysis of the 1619 Project’s many errors, or even have a listen to his two-part conversation with me and Antony Davies on Words & Numbers to get a sense of the types of criticisms he offers. But if all of this only serves to whet your appetite, you’re in luck.
The University of Washington Tries to Squelch Dissident Professor, Gets Sued
Print With increasing frequency, college and university officials are wading into needless battles that have nothing whatsoever to do with the education of students, but are simply motivated by ideological fervor. Their investigations and punishments harken back to the Spanish Inquisition. Disagree with us and you’ll suffer! Consider the University of Washington. Stuart Reges is a professor of computer science who has taught at the university since 2004.
Will AI Eat Our Lunch or Make It?
by admin · April 6, 2023 Artificial intelligence (AI) will disrupt the restaurant industry to an even greater degree than it has already. It will also enhance human creativity and improve our cuisine. Disrupting and Enhancing the Restaurant Industry Restaurant AI runs the gamut from high-speed information processing to generative AI systems. It can make reservation systems easier to operate, take orders (without error), and find new customers. It can even deliver pizzas and flip burgers.
Will 2024 Be the Ultimate Expressive Voting Election?
Print Do you remember how stridently democracy has been emphasized in recent elections? Voter ID laws were condemned as undermining democracy. Citizens (at least those expected to vote the “right” way) were browbeaten to vote as the only way to preserve democracy. When the party in power changed, even considering changing a policy backed earlier by only 50-percent-plus-one under its control was pilloried as an assault on democracy.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Byron
Contact Byron, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack