Books

Mercatus Books

All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Liberating Government Data image

All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Liberating Government Data

Jerry Brito | Feb 2010
When government refuses to make itself transparent and open and fails to make public information meaningfully available, hackers will liberate the data. It has happened many times over, and it will doubtlessly happen again. Each time government data is freed, citizens gain useful access to valuable information that rightly belongs to them. But perhaps more importantly, government is forced to deal with the new reality of a networked world in which the people demand free online access to public information.
The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery: Social Learning in a Post-disaster Environment image

The Cultural and Political Economy of Recovery: Social Learning in a Post-disaster Environment

Emily Chamlee-Wright | Feb 16, 2010
This book seeks to understand how people cultivate strategies for recovery when the answers are not obvious; when a genuine process of discovery is required; and at points when the social coordination problems a post-disaster environment presents are most pronounced. The analysis presented in this book suggests that at its core, post-disaster community redevelopment is a process of complex social learning.
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The Enlightened Economy

An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850
Joel Mokyr | Feb 16, 2010
The book discusses how the Enlightenment influenced social, political, economic, and scientific elites and how this influence contributed to the institutional changes that allowed Britain to move to the forefront of economic powers by 1850.
The Adam Smith Institute's

The Adam Smith Institute's "A Beginner's Guide to Liberty"

Three Mercatus Scholars contributed chapters to the Adam Smith Institute's "A Beginner's Guide to Liberty," the Institute's accessible introduction to the importance of liberty for human flourishing.
The Economic Point of View: The Collected Works of Israel M. Kirzner image

The Economic Point of View: The Collected Works of Israel M. Kirzner

The Economic Point of View is the inaugural volume in Liberty Fund’s new Collected Works of Israel M. Kirzner series. This work established Kirzner as a careful and meticulous scholar of economics. No other living economist is so closely associated with the Austrian School of economics as Israel M. Kirzner, professor emeritus of economics at New York University.
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The New Holy Wars

Economic Religion Versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America
Robert H. Nelson | Dec 07, 2009
Robert Nelson interprets the contemporary struggles between economists and environmentalists as battles between the competing secularized religions. This deep book probes beneath the surface of the two movements rhetoric to uncover their fundamental theological commitments and visions.
Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development: The Bloomington School image

Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development: The Bloomington School

The Bloomington School has become one of the most dynamic, well recognized and productive centers of the New Institutional Theory movement. Its ascendancy is considered to be the result of a unique and extremely successful combination of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches and hard-nosed empiricism. This book demonstrates that the well-known interdisciplinary and empirical agenda of Bloomington research program is the result of a less-known but very bold proposition: an attempt to revitalize and extend into the new millennium a traditional mode of analysis illustrated by authors like Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, Hamilton, Madison, and Tocqueville.
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Media, Development, and Institutional Change

Media, Development, and Institutional Change investigates mass media’s profound ability to affect institutional change and economic development. The authors use the tools of economics to illuminate the media’s role in enabling and inhibiting political-economic reforms that promote development.
An Entrepreneurial Theory of Social and Cultural Change image

An Entrepreneurial Theory of Social and Cultural Change

This chapter contends that the entrepreneur is the agent of social and cultural change. The authors consider the entrepreneur in three settings: market, non-market and political. Their purpose is to understand how entrepreneurs create anew or shift existing focal points and how they make these changes salient.
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Create Your Own Economy

The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World
Tyler Cowen | Jul 2009
How will we live well in a super-networked, information-soaked, yet predictably irrational world? The only way to know is to understand how the way we think is changing.