What is the relationship, if any, between economic freedom and pandemics? This paper addresses this question from a robust political economy approach. As is the case with recovery from natural disasters or warfare, a society that is relatively free economically offers economic actors greater...

Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is often read as a policy book and a political tract for its time. It is also often read as little more than a “slippery slope” argument, leading inevitably down a road from a free society to the gulag. In this paper, we counter the claim that The Road to Serfdom...

What explains the simultaneous critiques of economic theory and liberalism during the 1930s? Early neoclassical economists had a common understanding of the proper institutional context under-girding a liberal market order. From the marginal revolution emerged a growing emphasis on analyzing...

Our contribution in this chapter is to address the argument made by philosopher Samuel Freeman (2001) that libertarianism is not a liberal view. Freeman’s argument is based on the claim that full alienability of property rights is antithetical to liberal political institutions. We address...

Economic freedom is robustly associated with income growth, but does this association extend to the poorest in a society? In this paper, we employ Canada’s longitudinal cohorts of income mobility between 1982 and 2018 to answer this question. We find that economic freedom, as measured by the...

We investigate the institutional foundations of public health. We argue that a key distinction in analysis of disease is between diseases of commerce (diseases associated with movement of people and with affluence) and diseases of poverty (primarily noncommunicable diseases that depend on wealth...

Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology (2020) offers a powerful critique of ideological justifications for inequality in capitalist societies. Does this mean we should reject capitalist institutions altogether? This paper defends some aspects of capitalism by explaining the epistemic function...