christianhartselle, Author at Econ Briefs

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Author: christianhartselle

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Dates
- May 2025
- April 2025

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Infrastructure Without Inhabitants – by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz
- Macroeconomics
May 27, 2025 by christianhartselle
The Hebrew Scriptures tell us when King David captured the cities of the Ammonites, he ordered its residents “…to work with saws and iron picks and iron axes, or sent them to the brickworks.” (2 Samuel 12:31 NRSV) Although biblical scholars offer various interpretations, it appears to us the King set his captives on a […]

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Wildfires, Opioids, and the Legacy of Limited Liability – by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz
- Business
May 27, 2025 by christianhartselle
Potential corporate misconduct is in the news. Did downed power lines cause the wildfires in Hawaii and California? What more should the power companies have done to avoid wildfires? Did Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family push Oxycontin to increase their profits? Did they knowingly misrepresent how addictive their painkillers can be, potentially causing hundreds […]

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Why Fitch Cut America’s Rating—and Why It Matters – by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz
- Fed
May 23, 2025 by christianhartselle
Originally written on 8/15/2023 Earlier this month, Fitch Rating Service downgraded the United States’ Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR) from AAA to AA+. The current administration condemned the downgrade and blamed the previous administration, while the opposing party more or less hailed the downgrade. We suspect identical narratives would prevail if the party in […]

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Ohio, Israel, and Constitutions – by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz
- Government
May 23, 2025 by christianhartselle
An integral part of any economy is the political constitution under which is operates. Constitutions codify procedures and place limits on government actions. Constitutions stabilize the “rules of the game” that are crucial for rational economic calculation. Since constitutional law aims to provide certainty, the process for amending the constitution is designed to be cumbersome. […]

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The Price of Peace in El Salvador – by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz
- Government
May 23, 2025 by christianhartselle
Originally written on 7/25/2023 Economists are fond of saying there are no solutions to social problems, only trade-offs. Often these trade-offs cannot be known precisely in advance and are inherently “tragic.” Since March 2022, the government of El Salvador has incarcerated 68,000 citizens, or over 1% of the nation’s population. The news images shows rows […]

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Order Without Design: Lessons from Language – by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz
- History
May 23, 2025 by christianhartselle
18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson greatly influenced one of our favorite economists, Austrian-school Friedrich Hayek. Ferguson, a contemporary of the more famous Adam Smith, noted that many beneficial patterns of human interaction are “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” Ferguson’s idea of order without design influenced Hayek’s concept […]

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Networks That Shape History and Morality – by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz
- History
May 23, 2025 by christianhartselle
Leadership depends on the network of people you influence and the networks that influence you. Several recent economics studies examine the influence of social networks on people’s decisions. In “Leadership in Social Movements: Evidence from the ‘Forty-Eighters’ in the Civil War,” the authors look at social activists who supported the European Revolutions of 1848. Forty-Eighters […]

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The Center Holds—For Now – by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz
- Politics
May 23, 2025 by christianhartselle
Originally written on 6/6/2023 Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s 1919 verse “The Second Coming” not only reflected on the political turmoil of his time immediately after the First World War but foreshadowed the wars and horrors that were to unfold through the rest of the 20th century. Yeats prophesied a “rough beast, its hour comes […]

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Why TIPS Matter for the Fed – by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz
- Inflation
May 23, 2025 by christianhartselle
Originally written on 6/26/2023 A persistent and crucial economic question is and always will be: what will inflation be in the future? There is no foolproof method of knowing, but as we have highlighted in previous columns, there are indicators that give insights. Our favorite is the TIPS spread. In 1997, the U.S. Treasury started […]

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Muncie’s New Neighbors – by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz
- Immigration
May 9, 2025 by christianhartselle
Originally written on 6/20/2023 June 20th is World Refugee Day. The United Nations reports that 20 people per minute “leave everything behind to escape war, persecution or terror.” That adds up to about 10.5 million additional refugees per year. Before the war in Ukraine displaced millions of people, nearly seventy percent of displaced persons came […]

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