Governments throughout the Western world are spending at levels that could not have been imagined by pre-war economists - even by people such as Keynes. High levels of government spending have had a significant effect on economic growth and on economic freedom. In his 2013 Hayek lecture, Grover No[...]

Over the last few years, the financial sector has experienced its worst crisis since the 1930s. The collapse of major firms, the decline in asset values, the interruption of credit flows, the loss of confidence in firms and credit market instruments, the intervention by governments and central banks[...]

The global economy has become increasingly, perhaps chronically, unstable. Since 2008, we have heard about the housing bubble, subprime mortgages, banks "too big to fail," financial regulation (or the lack of it), and the European debt crisis. Wall Street has discovered that it is more profitable to[...]

Using applied general equilibrium methods to analyze recent debates about the conduct of U.S. foreign trade policy, de Melo and Tarr show that in terms of costs to the economy and to consumers, nontariff barriers in textiles, automobiles, and steel have more than reversed the benefits of cumulative [...]

These two volumes present empirical studies that have permanently altered professional debates over investment and productivity as sources of postwar economic growth in industrialized countries. The distinctive feature of investment is that returns can be internalized by the investor. The most strai[...]

Since its first publication in 1968, Bill C. Malone's Country Music, U.S.A. has won universal acclaim as the definitive history of American country music. Starting with the music's folk roots in the rural South, it traces country music from the early days of radio through the first decade of the twe[...]

In recent years the United Nations has become more active in-and more generally respected for-its peacekeeping efforts than at any other period in its fifty-year history. During the same period, the United States has been engaged in a debate about the place of the U.N. in the conduct of its foreign [...]

American art has been essential to The Phillips Collection since its founding by Duncan Phillips in 1921. Phillips' collecting interests were decidedly against the grain: he acquired the work of living American artists when it was unpopular to do so and promoted diversity, as seen in works by self-t[...]

A fierce critique of civil religion as the taproot of America's bid for global hegemony Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter A. McDougall argues powerfully that a pervasive but radically changing faith that "God is on our side" has inspired U.S. foreign policy ever since 1776. The first comprehen[...]