Feb 26, 2020

Karl Marx’s thoughts on socialism are popular among politicians and humanities professors, but not so much among business people and economics professors. In this episode, Phil Magness, economic historian and author of The Best of Karl Marx, joins Words & Numbers to talk about how Marx’s teachings were on the way...

Feb 19, 2020

We’ve all experienced incivility on the Internet. But today’s incivility is more than people being rude to each other online. Political leaders have become less civil toward each other, and political parties have become more extremist. Middle America, meanwhile, is becoming less represented as people on the...

Feb 12, 2020

Many people imagine that, when the government bans something, the banned thing goes away. In fact, what banning does is to remove government protections against violence, theft, and fraud. Justification for banning things that harm no one other than, perhaps, the person who wants those things hinges on inequality - that...

Feb 5, 2020

The Congressional Budget Office is tasked with forecasting the federal budget. Over the past twenty years, the CBO has tended to over-estimate future tax revenues and under-estimate future government spending. The result is that CBO paints an unrealistically rosy picture of the government’s financial future. If we...