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Nov 27, 2024 | 
mercatus.org | Christopher J. Coyne
Welcome back to the series, Perspectives on Peace, hosted by Chris Coyne. The first four episodes of this series will focus on The Legacy of Robert Higgs (Mercatus Center, 2024) and will feature a collection of short interviews with many of the chapter authors.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
mercatus.org | Christopher J. Coyne
Welcome back to the series, Perspectives on Peace, hosted by Chris Coyne. The first four episodes of this series will focus on The Legacy of Robert Higgs (Mercatus Center, 2024) and will feature a collection of short interviews with many of the chapter authors.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
mercatus.org | Christopher J. Coyne
Welcome to the series, Perspectives on Peace, hosted by Chris Coyne. The first four episodes of this series will focus on The Legacy of Robert Higgs (Mercatus, 2024) and will feature a collection of short interviews with many of the chapter authors. On this episode, Chris Coyne and Don Boudreaux discuss the life and legacy of Robert Higgs as featured in the newly published edited volume, The Legacy of Robert Higgs (Mercatus Center, 2024).
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
mercatus.org | Christopher J. Coyne
Published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. In testimony before Congress in 1969, economist Kenneth Boulding argued that “The war industry is a cancer within the body of American society. It has its own mode of growth, it represents a system which is virtually independent and indeed objectively inimical to the welfare of the American people, in spite of the fact that it still visualizes itself as their protector” (quoted in Joint Economic Committee 1969, 140).
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May 31, 2024 | 
mercatus.org | Christopher J. Coyne
The #1 New Release in Military Policy on AmazonA copy of the top-secret memo below recently came into our hands, and we thought we should bring it to your attention!“Dear National Security Elite:In an ideal world, the public would simply accept whatever their leaders—you, in other words—told them. They would comply with restrictions and mandates, not as a matter of mere obedience, but as a matter of unquestionable patriotic duty. But we don’t live in an ideal world.
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
mercatus.org | Christopher J. Coyne
This paper develops the economic case for practical pacifism. Practical pacifism, in contrast to absolute pacifism, recognizes that while it is possible that state-led war may be justified in some cases, it is extremely difficult to determine if any single instance of war is in fact justified; this leads one to a default position of pacifism. Using the tools of economics, we detail the main ways that political institutions are likely to fail and cause harm through warmaking-related activities.
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Mar 19, 2024 | 
mercatus.org | Christopher J. Coyne
The ratchet effect model developed by Higgs (1987) provides a framework for understanding growth in the scale and scope of government. We apply and expand this model to explain the adoption, accumulation, and drawdown of nuclear weapons arsenals in the United States. We analyze how the two separate, but intertwined crises of World War II and the subsequent Cold War led to the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons and the subsequent diminution of nuclear stockpiles.
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Mar 2, 2024 | 
mercatus.org | Christopher J. Coyne
Conventional wisdom tells us that prosocial feelings, such as altruism, are desirable and should be promoted as they yield positive social outcomes. However, the consequences of other-regarding behaviors are broadly ambiguous and may have unintended consequences, especially when they must pass through institutional filters.
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Oct 1, 2023 | 
vnexplorer.net | Jessica Alexander |Damien Brown |Christopher J. Coyne |Hugo Slim
1. Chasing Chaos, 2. Emergency Sex, 3. Band-Aid for a Broken Leg, 4. Doing Bad by Doing Good, 5. Humanitarian Ethics, 6. The Crisis Caravan, 7. An Imperfect Offering, 8. Digital Humanitarians, 9. Becoming an International Humanitarian Aid Worker, 10. Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed. There are many top books on humanitarian aid, whether you're looking to start a career in aid work or are an experienced humanitarian looking to learn more about what you do.
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Oct 1, 2023 | 
sup.org | Christopher J. Coyne
"Professor Coyne is obviously a dove rather than a hawk. But he accepts the case for occasional intervention for humanitarian reasons or to protect US citizens. His main suggestions are to avoid nation-building types of intervention and adopt free trade, if necessary unilaterally by the US. It is perhaps déformation professionelle for economists to overrate the spillover benefits of the latter.
