The Constitution of Liberty

The book as well as the author are well-known but not as one would expect, although the ideas have changed the world in a great extent. Most students of economics do not even know his name. Some professors do hear his name but never actually read his books. That is my experience while I studied in Japan as well as of today when I asked people around me about that... Of course, if you read only textbooks, you would probably never...

[Continue reading...]

Free to Choose

Prof. Mankiw of Harvard has written two worldly popular textbooks in economics: Principles of Economics and Macroeconomics. There are many universities and professors who use his textbooks in classrooms. In my university, Kobe University, his textbooks are popular for undergraduate and graduate levels. I enormously like his books, and that is where I got to know the book Free to Choose.    In his note on his further...

[Continue reading...]

Economics in One Lesson

I have no reservation to say that Economics in One Lesson is one of few books in economics that can explain economics in simplest ways for laymen and economists alike. Giant economists such as Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek were far from being able to do so. This is one of the reasons that I include it in my 5 must read books in economics. Clearly this book is an updated version of Bastiat’s That Which is...

[Continue reading...]

The End of History and the Last Man

What does it mean by The End of History? and the Last Man? Both expressions are highly correlated. Although the author, Francis Fukuyama, does not quote Ibrahim Maslow, his arguments follow him closely while debating with old time philosophers such as Hegel, Karl Marx, Plato, Socrates etc. While Maslow depicts human needs in order from basic to the need of recognition, political philosophers emphasize that those needs shape...

[Continue reading...]

Essays on Liberty

Summary  The birth of modern government system began with two simple principles: one is government is to protect one citizen from being abused by another citizen. Two is government is to protect itself from abusing citizens. The first principle requires that government sets up laws to protect property rights of all citizens. The second principle requires that government assigns limited roles to itself...

[Continue reading...]