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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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In Defense of Thinking

By the time of his untimely death in 1983, Herman Kahn was recognized by both friends and intellectual adversaries as "one of the world's most creative and best minds." The current growing resurgence of interest in Kahn's ideas and intellectual legacy demonstrates the enduring relevance of his work. Yet, in spite of the constant influence of his arguments, there is a shortage of books summarizing Kahn's essential contributions, and thus his work is not as well known as it should be. The Essential Herman Kahn is an attempt to cope with this predicament and offer the public for the first time an anthology consisting of the essence of Kahn's work, organized thematically.
The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates image

The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates

Peter Leeson | Apr 2009
With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates' notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior. Leeson argues that the pirate customs we know and love resulted from pirates responding rationally to prevailing economic conditions in the pursuit of profits. Revealing the democratic and economic forces propelling history's most colorful criminals, The Invisible Hook establishes pirates' trailblazing relevance to the contemporary world.