Schools brief
Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche
The prophets of illiberal progress
Terrible things have been done in their name
Rawls rules
Three post-war liberals strove to establish the meaning of freedom
Berlin, Rawls and Nozick put their faith in the sanctity of the individual
The exiles fight back
Hayek, Popper and Schumpeter formulated a response to tyranny
Their lives and reputations diverged, but their ideas were rooted in the traumas of their shared birthplace
Freedom v economics
Was John Maynard Keynes a liberal?
People should be free to choose. It was their freedom not to choose that troubled him
Liberal thinkers
De Tocqueville and the French exception
The gloomiest of the great liberals worried that democracy might not be compatible with liberty
The father of liberalism
Against the tyranny of the majority
John Stuart Mill's warning still resonates today
Overlapping generations
Kicking the can down an endless road
The final brief in our series on big economic ideas looks at the costs (and benefits) of passing on the bill to the next generation
Economics brief
The natural rate of unemployment
Policymakers have spent half a century in search of the natural rate of unemployment. The fifth in our series
Externalities
Pigouvian taxes
What to do when the interests of individuals and society do not coincide? The fourth in our series
Overcapacity and undercapacity
Say’s law: supply creates its own demand
The third brief in our series looks at the reasoning that made Jean-Baptiste Say famous
Six big ideas
Gary Becker’s concept of human capital
Becker made people the central focus of economics. The second in our series on big economic ideas
Six big ideas
Coase’s theory of the firm
If markets are so good at directing resources, why do companies exist? The first in our series on big economic ideas